EMOTIONAL AND MATERIAL ABANDONMENT AS CAUSES OF INDIGNITY AND DISINHERITANCE

ANALYSIS OF LAW N. 15.240/2025 AND BILL N. 4/2025

Abstract

The article analyzes the legal feasibility of recognizing emotional and material abandonment as causes for unworthiness and disinheritance in Brazilian inheritance law. It starts from the observation that the 1988 Constitution established human dignity and solidarity as the foundations of the family, imposing duties of coexistence and care among its members. However, the Civil Code of 2002 maintained an exhaustive list of grounds for exclusion from succession, without considering emotional abandonment as grounds for sanction. The research uses qualitative methodology, bibliographic, documentary, and jurisprudential research to examine and analyze recent normative developments, in particular Law No. 15,240/2025, which amended the Statute of Children and Adolescents to recognize emotional abandonment as a civil offense, imposing reparatory responsibility on parents who violate their legal duty of care. it also analyzes Bill No. 4/2025, which proposes the express inclusion of emotional and material abandonment as causes for unworthiness and disinheritance. The investigation discusses the transformation of affection into a legal value with punitive and patrimonial effectiveness, as well as its repercussions on the revision of the Civil Code currently pending in the Federal Senate. It concludes that the positivization of these behaviors as causes for exclusion from inheritance represents a measure of justice and axiological coherence, compatible with the process of constitutionalization of Civil Law and with the protection of affection as a legal-family duty.