Jurisdiction(s):
United Kingdom

Related legal acts

Key definition

Legacy definition

What does Legacy mean? In nuclear and environmental legal practice, legacy describes historic UK nuclear sites, facilities, materials, spent fuel and radioactive wastes from earlier civil or defence programmes, and the liabilities to decommission, manage and remediate them. It is a descriptive term rather than a defined statutory term, but is widely used in regulation, policy and contracts. Under the Energy Act 2004 the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) manages Great Britain’s designated nuclear legacy, regulated by the Office for Nuclear Regulation and the environment agencies. The nuclear legacy includes: (a) sites and facilities formerly operated by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and British Nuclear...

Legacies in wills: specific, general and demonstrative gifts; abatement, failure, payment, preservation, stocks and shares, receipts, interest, and IHT nil-rate band issues (England and Wales)

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Practice notes

legacy or bequest

The expressions ‘legacy’ and ‘bequest’ are ordinarily confined to a sum of money or a personal item, though in some situations they can also denote a gift or devise of land. Furthermore, whether a ‘legacy’ encompasses an annuity turns on the context. Sir William Page Wood VC, in Gaskin v Rogers, explained that where a Will merely uses the word ‘legacy’ and directs a distribution amongst legatees, then, unless the face of the Will shows the testator has departed from the word’s settled legal meaning, annuitants are included. He added that the term ‘pecuniary legatees’ does no more than exclude specific legatees—namely, those entitled to particular chattels—and it does not, prima facie, prevent annuitants receiving the same advantage as they would have enjoyed had the Will spoken simply of ‘legatees’ rather than ‘pecuniary legatees’. All such interpretative rules remain subject to the fundamental principle: determine, from the Will read as a whole, what can be gathered of the testator’s intention where the words employed are not of unmistakable clarity...

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Web page updated on 21/05/2026

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