Taiwan's legislature passed a landmark amendment to the Civil Code on July 28, abolishing a near-century-old provision that had guaranteed siblings a legally protected cut of a deceased person's estate — overriding even an explicit will. The reform is overdue, meaningful, and correct. It is also incomplete.
A Law Drafted for a Society That No Longer Exists
The inheritance chapter of Taiwan's Civil Code was written and promulgated in 1930, during the Kuomintang government's "political tutelage" period — a document now more than 90 years old. The society it was designed to regulate — multi-generational households, economically interdependent siblings, property concentrated predominantly in male hands — has long given way to nuclear family life, in which brothers and sisters often share little more than an annual holiday dinner.
Taiwan's inheritance framework turns on two central concepts. The first is the statutory share (應繼分), which sets out who may inherit and in what proportion when a person dies without a will. The second is the reserved portion (特留分) — a legally protected floor, comparable to what common-law jurisdictions call "forced heirship," that establishes a minimum inheritance an heir cannot be stripped of regardless of what a will instructs. The provision repealed by the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan's unicameral parliament, was Article 1223: a rule that reserved one-third of a sibling's statutory share for brothers and sisters. For a childless person whose parents had both died, that meant at least one-sixth of the total estate was legally owed to siblings — and no will could override it.
Even a Written Will Could Not Protect a Surviving Spouse
For a childless person in this situation, the consequences were tangible. Under the old framework, the surviving spouse could inherit no more than half the estate; the remainder was divided among siblings, a portion of it shielded by the reserved portion requirement. A will explicitly directing everything to a spouse made no legal difference. The siblings' share went to them regardless.
This provision came to national attention in 2016, when Evergreen Group founder Chang Yung-fa died and left the bulk of his estate and the company chairmanship to his fourth son, Chang Kuo-wei. The bequest ignited a prolonged and acrimonious legal battle among Chang's family members, in part because the will conflicted with the mandatory minimum shares the Civil Code guaranteed to other heirs. After the July 28 vote, Liu Wei-de, chairperson and attorney of the Taiwan Will Association, described the passage as "an important step toward testamentary autonomy in Taiwan's inheritance law" and a significant milestone for property self-determination.
Article 1144 Unchanged: The Default Still Cuts Spouses Short
Here is where the reform falls short. Removing the siblings' reserved portion means that individuals can now exclude their brothers and sisters from their estates — but only through a written will. The underlying default rules in Article 1144 of the Civil Code remain untouched. When a childless person dies without a will, the estate is still divided equally: half to the surviving spouse, half to the siblings.
The legislature recognized, in effect, that the law's assumptions about sibling relationships no longer reflect social reality — and then kept the old default in place, relying on individuals to override it by drafting a will. Legal experts and government officials have already acknowledged that most people never get around to doing so, and have pledged public awareness campaigns to close the gap. This places the burden of correcting an outdated legal assumption on private citizens rather than on the lawmakers who could simply update it.
A more complete reform would have amended Article 1144 directly: removing siblings from the default distribution of any estate shared with a surviving spouse, while preserving their place in the statutory inheritance order for cases where no spouse, children, or parents survive. That targeted change — adjusting Article 1144 without altering the priority framework in Article 1138 — was entirely within the legislature's power. It was not taken.
Inheritance Law Cannot Enforce Family Loyalty—and Shouldn't Try
The Ministry of Justice had originally proposed two companion measures alongside the siblings' reserved portion repeal: a "special contribution" mechanism allowing a sibling who provided significant caregiving to claim a larger share, and a discretionary bequest provision for economically vulnerable siblings. The legislature passed neither. The omission has drawn criticism, but that criticism may be misdirected.
Both measures rest on inherently subjective determinations — how substantial was a sibling's contribution, and by whose measure — that would likely generate new rounds of estate litigation rather than resolve existing ones. The reserved portion framework has always carried within it an ambition that law is ill-equipped to fulfill: using inheritance rules to enforce familial obligation, reward virtue, and protect the vulnerable. These are worthy social goals. They are not goals that a civil inheritance code reliably achieves.
The legislature did something important on July 28. A provision that made sense in an era of large, economically integrated family clans — and had long since ceased to make sense in any other — is finally gone. The harder next step is revisiting Article 1144 and asking, more broadly, whether inheritance law should be in the business of social engineering at all. That question should not take another 90 years to answer.
