Courts continue to look to the Restatement of the Law Third, Torts, for guidance on evolving matters of tort law. Recently, Vermont’s highest court adopted a provision of the Restatement of the Law Third, Torts: Economic Harm.
In Dewdney v. Duncan, 2025 WL 1479261 (Vt., May 23, 2025), the Supreme Court of Vermont recognized the tort of intentional interference with expectation of inheritance (IIEI) and adopted the definition of IIEI set forth in Restatement of the Law Third, Torts: Economic Harm § 19. In that case, the adult daughters of Anna Dewdney, the author and illustrator of the popular Llama Llama series of children’s books, brought a claim for IIEI against the author’s romantic partner. The daughters alleged that the parties were beneficiaries of an inter vivos trust created by the author to receive the royalty income from her books, that the author and the romantic partner had a fraught relationship, and that the romantic partner pressured the author to increase his distribution from the trust at the daughters’ expense. The trial court granted summary judgment or the defendant, ruling that IIEI was a cognizable cause of action in Vermont, but that the plaintiffs were required to first seek a remedy in the probate division.
The Supreme Court of Vermont affirmed the trial court’s decision, adopting the approach taken by Restatement of the Law Third, Torts: Economic Harm § 19. The court explained that IIEI as set forth under § 19 was analogous to preestablished torts of interference and was a natural extension of Vermont’s case law dealing with tortious interference. It further reasoned that the Restatement Third’s definition of IIEI, with its probate-exhaustion requirement, was the appropriate definition to adopt in contrast to the plaintiffs’ request to adopt the definition set forth in Restatement of the Law Second, Torts § 774B. The probate-exhaustion rule, explained the court, limited tort claims to avoid interference with ongoing probate proceedings while also preventing parties from circumventing the probate courts and litigating what were clearly probate issues before the general trial courts. Thus, the court concluded, the trial court was correct in holding that the plaintiffs were barred from bringing their IIEI claim in the civil division because they had not first pursued it in the probate division.