Salce v. Cardello

Summary

The dissent would have upheld the in terrorem clauses, reasoning that judicial invalidation requires a strong, important, clearly articulated, and dominant public policy that outweighs the testator's authority to condition testamentary benefits. It concludes that existing probate-supervision statutes provide adequate mechanisms to address fiduciary errors and do not establish such a dominant policy. The dissent therefore disagrees with relieving the beneficiary from the clauses merely because she challenged the fiduciary's tax filings in good faith.