Louisiana Governor Signs Amended “Lifetime Necessities” Law Obligating “Ascendants & Descendants”

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, one of (now many) candidates for the Republican nomination for President,  has been making a fair amount of press of late, for his positions on so-called medical marijuana, Common Core education standards, and how his state will handle same-sex marriage. Lower on the radar screen, however, was his signing of Act 260, an interesting package of legal changes affecting obligations between various family members.

One of these changes was to adopt a new provision affecting the obligations of “ascendants and descendants” to provide “basic necessities of life” for family members “in need.”  In other words, filial support. 

Louisiana already had a provision, Section 229, providing that “children are bound to maintain their father and mother and other ascendants who are in need.”  The new provision continues this statutory obligation, but makes enforcement “personal” only.  The substitute provision was signed into law on June 29 and becomes effective on January 1, 2016.  New Article 237 of Act 260 provides:

Descendants are bound to provide the basic necessities of life to their ascendants who are in need, upon proof of inability to obtain these necessities by other means or from other sources, and ascendants are likewise bound to provide for their needy descendants, this obligation being reciprocal.

 

This obligation is strictly personal and is limited to the basic necessities of food, clothing, shelter, and health care.

 

This obligation is owed by descendants and ascendants in the order of their degree of relationship to the obligee and is joint and divisible among obligors. Nevertheless, if the obligee is married, the obligation of support owed by his descendants and ascendants is secondary to the obligation owed by his spouse.

Official comments explaining the revisions emphasize that the necessities obligation kicks in only when the needy family member is unable to obtain necessities “by other means” or from “other sources,” thus signaling any filial support obligation is secondary to the individual’s eligibility for public assistance or other welfare benefits. Further “for the first time” Louisiana law “provides a ranking of those descendants and ascendants who owe this reciprocal, lifetime obligation.”

The commentary explains that the revision makes the obligation “strictly personal,” and there it precludes enforcement by “a third person.”  Thus, it would appear that unlike in Pennsylvania (or Germany?) nursing homes and the state may not use these statutes in order to sue family members to collect necessities for indigent elders.

According to the comments, the obligation is also not “heritable.”  This appears to reflect a Louisiana Court of Appeals decision from 2010, In re Succession of Elie,denying a mother’s claims for funds from a deceased son’s estate brought under former Section 229.