Definition
Without children is a legal phrase meaning that a person died, lived, or held an estate leaving no surviving children or issue. The phrase appears most frequently in wills, trusts, deeds, and other instruments dealing with the disposition of property where survivorship of children or descendants is a condition of inheritance. When a testator or grantor provides that a gift shall pass "if [a person] dies without children," the phrase triggers an alternative disposition — typically to a remainder beneficiary — upon the failure of that condition.
The phrase is functionally equivalent to the Latin sine liberis, under which it is treated in many historical legal dictionaries. In instruments predating modern drafting conventions, "without children" may be construed narrowly to mean biological children only, or broadly to encompass grandchildren and more remote descendants, depending on the jurisdiction and the instrument's broader language.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Without children" has no specialized Wiktionary entry; in ordinary usage, it simply describes a person or household that does not have children.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No dedicated entry. "Without" is defined as "not having; destitute of; free from."
The legal gap is modest but real. In ordinary speech, "without children" is a present-state description — a person currently has no children. In legal instruments, the phrase most often operates as a future condition: whether a person shall have died or shall at a given point in time leave no surviving children. The temporal dimension and the question of what counts as "children" (biological issue only, adopted children, posthumous children, grandchildren) are legally loaded in ways that everyday usage does not capture.
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Common Confusion
WITHOUT CHILDREN vs. WITHOUT ISSUE: The two phrases are often used interchangeably in older instruments, but they are not synonymous. "Issue" is traditionally a broader term encompassing all lineal descendants — children, grandchildren, and further generations — while "children" in its strict legal sense refers only to first-generation descendants. Courts in different periods and jurisdictions have sometimes read "without children" to mean "without issue," particularly when surrounding instrument language suggests the testator intended a broader class. Researchers examining historical wills and deeds should never assume the phrases are interchangeable without consulting the controlling jurisdiction's interpretive rules.
WITHOUT CHILDREN vs. DYING WITHOUT ISSUE: "Dying without issue" carries additional complexity because it can be construed as either definite failure of issue (no issue living at the time of death) or indefinite failure of issue (issue becoming extinct at any future point). "Without children" generally escapes the indefinite-failure problem but raises its own interpretive questions about what qualifies as a child.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with historical wills, deeds, and settlement instruments will encounter "without children" as a condition of gift or as a defeasance clause. Several navigational points are essential:
First, the phrase is an index entry redirecting to sine liberis in Burrill and comparable historical dictionaries. Researchers who look only under "without children" may miss substantive treatment filed under the Latin form.
Second, temporal construction is critical and jurisdiction-dependent. Many nineteenth-century cases turned on whether "without children" meant at the time of death or at some later point. The interpretive rule adopted by the controlling court determines whether a contingent remainder vested, whether an executory interest was triggered, and whether property passed by intestacy.
Third, the question of adopted children is historically significant. Older instruments drafted before the widespread recognition of adoptive legal relationships may have been interpreted to exclude adopted children from the class. Modern construction in most jurisdictions now presumes adopted children are included absent contrary evidence, but historical instruments require caution.
Fourth, posthumous children — those born after the death of a parent — have generated interpretive litigation. Whether a child born after the triggering event satisfies or defeats a "without children" condition is not uniform across jurisdictions or time periods.
Fifth, researchers consulting case law databases should run parallel searches under sine liberis, "dying without issue," "failure of issue," and "defeasance" to capture the full body of relevant authority, because courts and treatise writers did not use these phrases consistently.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary does not provide a substantive entry under "without children," instead directing the reader to sine liberis. This cross-referencing practice is common in nineteenth-century legal dictionaries, which treated Latin maxims and phrases as the authoritative form and English equivalents as secondary or colloquial. Researchers relying solely on English-language lookups in historical dictionaries will systematically miss the core doctrinal treatment.
The Burrill entry also includes a citation to Story on Bills and a Massachusetts report citation, which are unrelated to the property-law meaning of the phrase and appear to be a typographic or compositional error in the source — a reminder that historical legal dictionaries were not immune to editorial irregularities and that anomalous entries should be verified against the cited source before reliance.
No other source dictionaries in the current corpus provide independent treatment of this phrase. Researchers needing deeper historical coverage should consult Bouvier's Law Dictionary under sine liberis and related entries on failure of issue, and period-specific treatise literature on real property and future interests.
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Jurisdictional Note
Construction of "without children" in wills and deeds has historically varied between English common-law courts and American jurisdictions, and among American states. Some states enacted statutes governing the construction of failure-of-issue language that affect how "without children" clauses are interpreted. Researchers should identify the jurisdiction and the date of the instrument before applying any general interpretive rule.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
No Law Mind Encyclopedia entry directly addresses the phrase "without children" in the property or succession context. The closest adjacent entries are:
torts_5: Negligence — Standard of Care for Children (The Law Mind Torts & Personal Injury Encyclopedia) — tangentially related to legal treatment of children as a defined class, but not directly on point for property instruments.
Researchers may find more relevant treatment in encyclopedia entries on future interests, conditions subsequent, and intestate succession if those entries exist in the corpus.
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