Free US Law Dictionary

Illegitimacy

In common law, "legitimacy" refers to the status of children who are born to parents that are legally married, or who are born shortly after a marriage ends through divorce. The opposite of legitimacy is the status of being "illegitimate" — born to a woman and a man who are not married to one another.

In both canon and civil law, the offspring of putative marriages are legitimate.

Legitimacy was formerly of great consequence, in that only legitimate children could inherit their fathers' estates. In the United States, in the early 1970s, a series of Supreme Court decisions abolished most, if not all, of the common-law disabilities of bastardy, as being violations of the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.