What Probate Is and Why It Exists

Probate is the legal process used to confirm who has authority to manage a deceased person’s estate, identify what the person owned and owed, pay valid debts and taxes, and transfer remaining property to the right beneficiaries or heirs.

This lesson explains probate as a court-supervised system for creating order after death. It focuses on why probate exists, what problems it solves, what it does not do, and how to think about probate as a practical sequence rather than a single event.