On the death of an insured, any life insurance acquired by the insured or the insured’s spouse and payable to the intestate insured’s estate benefits the surviving spouse and children and the proceeds shall be divided between them according to the statutes of distribution without being in any manner subject to the debts of the decedent. If the proceeds of the insurance are payable to the estate of a testate decedent or the trustee of a revocable trust of which the decedent was a settlor, the proceeds shall pass as part of the estate or trust and under the dispositive provisions of the will or trust agreement, as ordinary cash, whether or not the will or trust agreement uses any apt or express words referring to the insurance proceeds, but the proceeds shall not be subject to the debts of the decedent unless specifically charged with the debts in the will or trust agreement.
Tenn. Code Ann. § 56-7-201
Life insurance payable to surviving spouse and children — Effect of proceeds being payable to estate
Known as the Tennessee Insurance Law
The act spans §§ 56-10-101 to 56-8-206 (1,220 sections).
Applied in 4 court decisions — leading case McLemore v. Huffines (In Re Huffines) (1985)
Most recently applied in Marler v. Scoggins (December 2002)
Code 1858, § 2478 (deriv
How often courts cite this section
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.
Current official text: Tennessee Code (LexisNexis). Digitized from the UniCourt Code Improvement Commission public-domain capture. Reproduced from public-domain Tennessee statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.