Interestingly, after considerable debate, Americans came to the same conclusion in the years after the Revolution: entails were forbidden, even in the South. As Thomas Jefferson famously put it, “the Earth belongs to the living.” And equipartition of estates among siblings became the legal default, that is, the rule that applied in the absence of an explicit will (although the freedom to make one’s will as one pleases still prevails in both the United States and Britain, in practice most estates are equally divided among siblings).
