legal intent

A presumed intent, for example, the intent to accomplish the natural and probable consequences of one's acts. 29 Am J2d Ev § 204. A term applied without circumspection to the intent of a testator. In strict reasoning, a testator can have but one intent,-his own actual intent. To speak of a testator's legal intent is strictly a solecism; there is no such thing. So that, when it is said that a testator's legal intent is to be gathered from the decisions of the court of his domicil, nothing more is meant than that whatever his actual intent may have been, if he has used in his will certain technical terms to which the courts of his domicil have attached a crystallized and settled judicial meaning which has become a rule of property in that state, then such will, wherever it comes under construction in other states, will have the same meaning given to those technical words which the courts of his domicil gave them. That is what the phrase "legal intent" means, and this rule about the legal intent being governed by the courts of his domicil means. In truth, we should only speak of a testator's actual intent, for that is all the testator ever had. If it violates no law, it stands. If it violates the law, the will fails, unless either statute or the settled decisions of the courts have given the terms which he has used a meaning which will save the will. Ball v Phelan, 94 Miss 293, 49 So 956.