What is the legitime of a child? It is one half of the estate of the deceased parent.

By way of a rough
illustration, if a person has P10 million, without parent or spouse but with one child, he can make a will
giving P5 million to his child and the other P5 million to charity or he can give all of it to his child. If he
does not make a will, all the P10 million will go to his child upon his death. If he had no spouse nor child,
legitimate or illegitimate, but his parents survive him, the parents are entitled to the whole estate and
each parent gets half. He can make a will, however, limiting his parents to their legitime of one-fourth
each while giving the other half to anyone. Where there are more illegitimate children than legitimate
children, the legitime of the illegitimate children cannot exceed the free portion which in the above
illustration is P5 million. For example, where there is only one legitimate child, he gets P5 million. If there
are seven illegitimate children, theoretically each one should get one-half of the legitimate child’s P5
million which is P2.5 million each. But since the total legitime of the illegitimate children should not
exceed the free portion of P5 million, each illegitimate child will get only P714,285. The testator cannot
diminish the legitime of P5 million of the legitimate child.

Supposing the survivors are: the spouse, five legitimate children, and seven illegitimate children and
assume that the estate is worth P10 million. One half or P5 million will be the legitime of the five
legitimate children. The wife will get a share equal to one legitimate child, meaning she gets P1 million
from the other half of P5 million. The free portion is now only P4 million. Since each illegitimate child is
entitled to a legitime of only one-half of that of a legitimate child or P500,000 the total legitime of the
seven illegitimate child will be P3.5 million. The balance of P500,000 is the net free portion that the
testator can give to anyone by making a will. However, if there is no will, the P500,000 will also be
divided among the said heirs with each of the five legitimate children and the spouse getting an amount
double that of one illegitimate child.

There are other provisions of law on legitime and numerous variations of the above rough illustrations.
As it is, the foregoing is already very confusing to an ordinary person. But if it is any consolation,
sometimes even lawyers have a hard time figuring out who gets what, particularly where the estate is
composed not only of cash but real and personal properties whose values cannot easily be determined.
In fact, most lawyers themselves concede that they are poor in math.