ABSTRACT
This chapter examines homage to the influence of Stephen D. White by combining some of the major themes treated in his work, such as kinship, disputing and law, and the emotion of anger. As the work of Stephen D. White has shown for western France, when a conflict or challenge like Huguette's was initiated, it was rarely over the provisions in the testament. The dispute Huguette Clark was a philanthropist, she brought against her mother, as well as similar cases from southern France, confirm that White's findings are not limited merely to Western France. As White found in western France, "What remained a subject of controversy and strife was not so much the principle of hereditary succession, but the precise implications of that principle in a large class of vexing individual cases". While Arnold reasoning follows the general aim of the statute, the nuance in his counterclaim sheds some light on how that principle may have been understood by contemporaries.
