Estates and Trusts Commons^™

Is Chinese Law Well-Prepared For Al Songs?: A Note Of Caution On The Over-Expansion Of Personality Rights, Yang Chen

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) singers, or more precisely, AI songs cloning celebrities' real voices (AI songs), have become a key topic in the entertainment industry and among fan groups across the globe, particularly in China. AI songs have attracted considerable attention from the legal community, as they unsurprisingly raise various ethical and legal issues. Examples of hotly discussed legal issues surrounding AI songs include whether using prior published songs to train AI models violates copyright holders' rights and whether the creators of Al songs breach copyright protection by training AI to sing songs copyrighted by other celebrities or companies. One …

Situating The Modern Public Trust Doctrine In Trust Law: The Duty Of Loyalty And The Case For Bifurcated, De Novo Judicial Review, Edward A. Zelinsky

Articles

This article situates the modern public trust doctrine (PTD) in contemporary trust law. Grounding the PTD in trust law leads to two important corollaries. First, the PTD planted in trust law imposes upon government actors and agencies trust law’s fiduciary duty of loyalty. In the context of the PTD, that duty of loyalty runs to the public as the beneficiary of the PTD. Second, faced with plausible claims that this fiduciary duty of loyalty to the public has been violated, courts should apply trust law’s de novo standard of review to those administrative and legislative decisions alleged to impair public …

The Rule Against Perpetual Celebrity, Yvette Joy Liebesman

American University Law Review

Post-mortem Right of Publicity (ROP) statutes have grown from relative obscurity and of little value to a reliable source of nonwage income for those lucky enough to be the legatees of a famous now-deceased person. Unlike most other intellectual property rights, there is no federal ROP statute. Rather, an individual’s ROP—both while alive and post-mortem—is governed by state law. This has led to a widespread range of term lengths for this right among the states that have either common law or statutory post-mortem ROP rights.

While there might be some value in them, if the post-mortem ROP term is too …

Freedom To Give, Devise, And Bequeath, Raymond C. O'Brien

Scholarly Articles

The ability to freely give, devise, or bequeath property is commonly thwarted by persons granted standing to contest formalities and intentionalities of wills, tortious interference with an expectancy, and expanding concern over intervivos gifts and trusts due to increasing elder financial abuse. Nonetheless, there is an expanding class of older, wealthy, and independent-minded donors who seek an effective means by which they may give their wealth to whomever they wish and bypass expensive legal fees, protracted litigation, loss of privacy, and the emotional drama of court proceedings. This Article offers a suggestion of how to restrict the possibility of contest …

Holding All The Cards: The Role Of The Oklahoma Family Wealth Preservation Trust Act In The Game Of Domestic Asset Protection, T. Grace Hall

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

In A New York State Of Mind: The Corporate Trustee’S Toolkit For Effectuating Non-Judicial Trust Modifications In The Empire State, Michael J. Borger

Touro Law Review

When the need to effectuate a non-judicial trust modification of a New York trust arises, the law in its current form provides corporate trustees with a tremendous amount of power and flexibility to amend, revoke, and establish new trusts with more favorable provisions. Depending upon the facts and circumstances of a particular situation (i.e., whether the settlor is alive, whether minor beneficiaries hold an interest in the trust, and whether there is dissension and discord among the beneficiaries, etc.) there are various statutes that will help a corporate trustee implement a sound strategy to modify a trust to attain favorable …