Adult Adoption on Trial: In the Matter of the Trust for the Benefit of Doris Duke, et al.

ABSTRACT:Part memoir, part advocacy, and part original scholarship, this essay tells the story of my experience in 1995 as a legal consultant to prominent New York City law firm Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam & Roberts. It is adapted from the affidavit I wrote affirming that James Buchanan Duke, the American tobacco tycoon, would have viewed Chandi Duke Heffner, an adopted adult, as a "lineal descendent," within the meaning of the Doris Duke Trust set up by Duke, and thus she was entitled to a fortune estimated at $177 million. James B. Duke (1856–1925) belonged to a class of entrepreneurs who pursued great wealth, steadfast devotion to philanthropy, and the founding of adoption agencies for infants. Beginning in the 1850s, state legislatures enacted adult adoption laws most likely to accommodate the fact that adolescents were often placed in farm families and adopted years later when they had attained adulthood. By the Progressive era, members of the wealthy business class practiced adult adoption to bequeath inheritance, show devotion to young friends, reward service, and continue their philanthropic pursuits after they had died. Adult adoption was treated in the press and among industrialists and upper-class Americans as a normal, acceptable activity, in part because American society was accustomed to adoptions at a late age and in part because adult adoptions fit this class's unique social and financial needs. Duke, like others of his class and era, would have approved of adoption in general and adult adoption in particular.