The paper focuses on current and future challenges of inheritance law with regard to the making and dissolution of wills. Dogmatic and normative approaches on the one hand, as well as empirical approaches on the other hand, are chosen in order to find out to what extent dogmatics is able to open up to empiricism and in particular to empirical social research or even requires it. After a dogmatic outline of the current State of the Arts, a questionnaire study is developed with the aim of confronting the dogmatic research questions with the empirical findings. Consequently, results for our current law are to be derived. The project will lead to proposals for legal policy reform. In view of increasing life expectancy and the distribution of resources, inheritance law will have to face greatest challenges in the coming decades.