Share of the spouse
Applied in 3 court decisions — leading case In Re Estate of Smid (2008)
Most recently applied in Liebel v. Liebel (June 2024)
Source: SL 1995, ch 167, § 2-102.
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
The intestate share of a decedent's surviving spouse is:
(1) The entire intestate estate if:
(i) No descendant of the decedent survives the decedent; or
(ii) All of the decedent's surviving descendants are also descendants of the surviving spouse;
(2) The first $100,000, plus one-half of any balance of the intestate estate, if one or more of the decedent's surviving descendants are not descendants of the surviving spouse.
Official source: South Dakota Legislature. Reproduced from public-domain South Dakota statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.