In civil law and Roman law, the legitime (legitima portio), also known as a forced share or legal right share, of a decedent's estate is that portion of the estate from which he cannot disinherit his children, or his parents, without sufficient legal cause.
The legitime cannot be infringed in order to give a spouse or other beneficiary a greater share of the estate.
Therefore, when a decedent has children and leaves a will, it is unlawful for the testator to override the legitime by special gift which exhausts the estate or by designating his spouse or other person as sole beneficiary.
Most jurisdictions in the United States have enacted statutes that prohibit a testator from disinheriting a spouse, or provided that in the event of such a will the spouse may elect to "take against the will" and claim a statutory share of a decedent's estate.
Formerly, in Louisiana the legitime operated to prevent a parent from wholly disinheriting his children, who were and are still called forced heirs.
This change is essentially the importation of the common law doctrine of freedom of testation, but stops short of fully abolishing forced heirship because that is expressly forbidden by Louisiana Constitution Article XII, Section 5.
Under the Civil Code of the Philippines, the legitime is given to and/or shared by the compulsory heirs of the decedent.
The surviving spouse or illegitimate children, when either concur with the parents or ascendants, get one fourth of the estate.
The surviving spouse gets one half of the estate when there are no other heirs, and in certain cases, when the marriage is in articulo mortis, he or she gets one third.