Estates and Trusts Commons^™

Discounts For Fractional Ownership Of Real Property Are Accepted, So Why Haven’T The Irs And Courts Accepted Discounts For Fractional Ownership Of Artwork?, Maren N. Eisenmesser

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

In 2014, the Fifth Circuit held that Mr. Elkins’s estate was entitled to apply a fractional ownership discount to determine the taxable value of the undivided interest in artwork. The estate received a $14 million refund plus interest. The Internal Revenue Code directs taxpayers to value the items in a gross estate at their fair market value. Fractional ownership adds another problem in the valuation of an estate’s interest property. In general, courts have accepted fractional ownership discounts for real property. In contrast, courts have been reluctant to apply a fractional ownership discount for artwork. This Note will argue that …

Trustee Liability For Breach Of Trust—Loss Or Profit, Or Loss And Profit?, Kenneth F. Joyce

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Cuban Asset Control Regulations: The Transfer Of Estate Assets To Cuban Heirs Under The Obama And Trump Administrations, Madeleine N. Elser

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

No abstract provided.

Fits, Starts, And Finishes (Reviewing David Horton, Wills Without Signatures, 99 B.U. L. Rev. 1623 (2019)), Katheleen Guzman

Other Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Neglecting Responsibilities: The Uniform Probate Code's Failure To Address Child Maltreatment And Poverty, Joshua Hamlet

Journal of Law and Policy

When a child or adolescent passes away, parents are typically stricken with grief and unable to cope with the devastation. Unfortunately, the emotional toll is not the only challenge parents face. Some are forced to handle legal battles regarding the administration of their deceased child’s estate. Since the majority of children do not have a will, state adoptions of the Uniform Probate Code dictate what happens to the child’s estate during these tragedies. But what happens in the event these parents abused or neglected their child while that child was still living? While the Uniform Probate Code advises that these …

Wills, Trusts, And Estates, J. William Gray Jr., Katherine E. Ramsey

University of Richmond Law Review

The 2019 Virginia General Assembly did not enact any major new legislation, but it did pass several significant amendments. Among the most useful was an amendment to the Virginia Uniform Transfers to Minors Act which extended the maximum age for custodianships from twenty-one to twenty-five. The legislature also decided to cease imposing income taxes on estates and trusts whose sole connection to the Commonwealth is that they are being administered here. It responded to two recent court cases involving the required execution formalities for leases and the right to award attorneys’ fees in actions involving an agent’s breach of fiduciary …

Unlimited Liability For Banks: Deposits As Fraudulent Transfers, Katherine Zampas

St. Mary's Law Journal

One of a trustee’s most valuable resources in bankruptcy proceedings is his avoidance powers. A trustee is charged with the duty to recover and recapture any property wrongfully removed from the estate by way of fraudulent transfer or preference. In some cases, a trustee has attempted to treat a debtor’s deposit into a bank account as a transfer, rendering it subject to his avoidance powers. Such a result will leave banks collaterally responsible as a transferee for a debtor’s conduct despite their lack of culpability and control over the funds.

The definition of transfer within the Bankruptcy Code is comprehensive …

Remedying The Abuse Of Organisational Forms: Trusts And Companies Considered, Pey Woan Lee

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Both the trust and the company are organisational forms distinguished bytheir ability to facilitate affirmative asset partitioning. However, this feature isvulnerable to abuse by those whose purpose is to defeat creditor rights. Thisarticle considers recent developments in judicial doctrines aimed atcountering such abuse and the extent to which they are explicable by, orcoherent, with economic analyses drawn from the work of Hansmann andKraakma.

Libraries, Authors, And Literary Estates: The Complex Case Of Rosenbach V. Sendak (2016), Patrick Roughen

Charleston Library Conference

This research examines a lawsuit filed by the Rosenbach Museum and Library of Philadelphia in 2016 against the Estate of Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) to determine the distribution of some of Sendak’s collection of rare books. In the lawsuit, the Rosenbach claimed the executors of the Sendak estate had withheld a portion of the rare books to which it was entitled under Sendak’s will. This paper suggests possible ways in which institutions such as libraries, archives, and museums might anticipate and address some of the ownership-related problems that arise during the acquisition and/or loss of collections of an artist or author …

Transfer On Death Deeds: It Is Time To Establish The Rules Of The Game, Stephanie Emrick

Florida Law Review

A transfer on death deed is a form of deed that allows real property assets to pass at death outside of the probate process. Through the twentieth century, there has been a movement in the world of property law—dubbed “the nonprobate revolution”—that focuses on using will substitutes to transfer personal property assets at death without the typical probate process. This is important because the probate process can be quite lengthy and expensive. Until recently, the nonprobate option was not readily available where real property assets were a part of the estate. The transfer on death deed essentially evolved from the …

Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Holmes: A Tale Of Two Testaments, Stephen R. Alton

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

What Can The Apple Teach The Orange? Lessons U.S. Land Trusts Can Learn From The National Trust In The U.K., Jessica Owley, Lauren Gwin, Sally K. Fairfax

Articles

The National Trust in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland is one of the oldest and most revered private land conservation organizations in the world. While the private land conservation movements in the United States and the United Kingdom began at a similar time and with similar tools, conservation attitudes and methods in the two countries diverged. Today, the National Trust dominates land conservation in the U.K. while the strength of the U.S. movement is the energy of over 1,500 smaller organizations operating at different scales across the country. Despite the differences, this project looks to the National Trust in England …

Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Holmes: A Tale Of Two Testaments, Stephen R. Alton

Faculty Scholarship

Author's Note: This Article takes the form of an epistolary exchange across the centuries, comparing and contrasting two noted wills in Victorian literature. To preserve verisimilitude, the author lets these letters and emails speak for themselves, without any formal introduction, just as would have occurred in Victorian epistolary fiction. It is the author's hope that the relevant testaments and the legal issues they present will make themselves clear as these exchanges proceed. Any reader desiring a more formal introduction to this Article is directed to the first email (below) written by the author to Mr. Utterson and Mr. Holmes; this …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Purpose Trusts As A Planning Tool For The 21st Century, Thomas Simmons, Brad Myers

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

In Re Fund For Encouragement Of Self Rel., 135 Nev. Adv. Op. 10 (Apr. 25, 2019), Skylar Arakawa-Pamphilon

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

NRS § 163.556 does not permit a court to disregard trustees' objections and appoint half of a wholly charitable trust’s assets to a new trust when, pursuant to the trust instrument’s terms, all trustees must consent before distributing half of the trust’s assets.

Proposed New York Trust Code, Surrogate’S Court Advisory Committee To The Chief Administrative Judge Of The Courts Of The State Of New York

Other Scholarship

Text of a proposed New York Trust Code to be submitted to the New York Legislature.

Welcoming E-Wills Into The Mainstream: The Digital Communication Of Testamentary Intent, Paige Hall

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

E-Notice And Comment On Due Process, Sergio J. Campos

Articles

No abstract provided.

"Body" Building: Expanding Arkansas's Standard For Holographic Wills, Andrew L. Lawson

Arkansas Law Review

In times past, entirely handwritten documents represented the vast majority of holographic wills. These homemade testaments included dense pages of text that the drafter diligently memorialized by hand, carefully crafted letters with testamentary directions to the author’s loved ones, and unassuming notes tucked away in a drawer, perhaps with names, proportions, and shorthand property descriptions. If a probate court encountered a holographic testament, odds were that it resembled these traditional examples.

Strangers In The Law: Lawyers' Law And The Other Legal Dimensions, Mauro Bussani

Cardozo Law Review

Political and legal theories have long been takingfor granted the idea that law is the province of government and government recognized authorities, including the judiciary. They have concentrated on the processes and principles, by which the form and substance of State law are determined, implemented, and enforced. This law is what I will call official or State law. By contrast, many non-official sites of legal production have always existed and still exist (outside and) inside the West. These sites produce rules that may flourish indifferent to or in opposition to official law and take the settlement of disputes arising out …

Unwinding Irrevocable Trusts, Thomas Simmons

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Strengthening The Passivity Default, Ian Ayres, Edward Fox

Articles

In The Prudence of Passivity, Bryon Harmon and Laura Fisher (hereafter HF) argue that "passive management become the default approach for the investment of trust funds, to be abandoned only when circumstances specifically dictate the use of active management."' In this comment we argue that their thesis could be strengthened (i) by more clearly distinguishing between default law and default investment practices, (ii) by more clearly articulating their favored altering rules.

Fiduciary Principles In Chinese Law, Nicholas C. Howson

Book Chapters

This chapter examines the principles of fiduciary doctrine that are found in Chinese law, with a particular focus on developments in law and regulation in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) after the early 1980s. It also considers the advent and elaboration of what the Anglo-American legal system calls “corporate fiduciary duties,” including partnership fiduciary duties. The chapter first provides an overview of basic conceptions of corporate fiduciary duties that entered Chinese law and practice through at least three separate tracks: academic, regulatory, and jurisprudential. It then explores corporate and partnership fiduciary duties after 2006, placing emphasis on corporate law …

Probate Funding And The Litigation Funding Debate, Jeremy Kidd

Washington and Lee Law Review

Third-party funding of legal claims is becoming more common, and increasingly more controversial. Whether in the legislative arena or in the courts, the fight over whether and how independent parties might provide funding to litigants has become heated. The fight now threatens to spill over into the probate realm, where funders have begun purchasing probate rights from putative heirs. These probate funding transactions share many characteristics with broader litigation funding but also differ in important respects. The meager existing literature tends to address the issue in a pre-biased and methodologically unsound way, making it impossible to properly assess the nature …

Max's Taxes: A Tax-Based Analysis Of Pet Trusts, Gerry W. Beyer, Jonathan P. Wilkerson

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Domestic Asset Protection Trusts: A Debtor's Friend And Creditor's Foe, Nora Hood

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

In 1997, Alaska enacted the first law in the United States legalizing Domestic Asset Protection Trusts (DAPTs), also referred to as self-settled asset protection trusts, as valid legal entities. Under traditional trust law, a debtor cannot shield assets from creditors by placing them in a trust for his or her own benefit. Alaska’s statute allowing DAPTs calls the traditional rule into question. This Note will examine use of DAPTs in the United States, including whether or not the recently amended Uniform Voidable Transaction Act would consider any transfer to a DAPT voidable per se, and discuss an approach that intends …

Less Trust Means More Trusts, Bridget J. Crawford

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

The word “trust” has multiple meanings. In everyday speech, it refers to a feeling of confidence associated with integrity, such as trusting that a friend will keep a secret. In the financial context, some law students, lawyers and lucky individuals also understand that a trust is a near-magical device that splits legal and equitable title. A trustee holds formal legal title to property for the benefit of a beneficiary simply because the grantor declares it to be so. By turning the spotlight on “trust,” in both senses of the word, one can discern fault lines in contemporary U.S. political and …

Afterlife Of The Death Tax, Samuel D. Brunson

Indiana Law Journal

More than a century ago, Congress enacted the modern estate tax to help pay for World War I. Unlike previous iterations of the estate tax, though, this one outlived the war and accumulated additional goals beyond merely raising revenue. The estate tax helped ensure the progressivity of the tax system as a whole, and it limited the hereditary ability to accumulate wealth.

This modern estate tax almost instantly met with opposition, though. The opposition has never been sufficient to entirely eliminate the estate tax, but it has severely weakened its ability to raise revenue and to prevent the accumulation of …

Standing For Standing Rock?: Vindicating Native American Religious And Land Rights By Adapting New Zealand's Te Awa Tupua Act To American Soil, Malcolm Mcdermond

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

On February 23, 2017, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe (“Tribe”) was forced to disband its nearly year-long protest against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which threatened the integrity of its ancestral lands. The Tribe sought declaratory and injunctive relief in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, but the court ruled against the Tribe and failed to protect its interests. While the United States was forcibly removing Indigenous protesters, other countries were taking steps to protect Indigenous populations. In unprecedented legislative action, New Zealand took radical steps to protect the land and cultural rights of …