Estates and Trusts Commons^™

How Should Inheritance Law Remediate Inequality?, Felix B. Chang

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Essay argues that trusts and estates (“T&E”) should prioritize intergenerational economic mobility—the ability of children to move beyond the economic station of their parents—above all other goals. The field’s traditional emphasis on testamentary freedom fosters the stickiness of inequality. For wealthy settlors, dynasty trusts sequester assets from the nation’s system of taxation and stream of commerce. For low-income decedents, intestacy splinters property rights and inhibits their transfer, especially to nontraditional heirs.

Holistically, this Essay argues that T&E should promote mean regression of the wealth distribution curve over time. This can be accomplished by loosening spending in ultrawealthy households and spurring savings and investment in low-income households.

T&E scholars are tackling inequality with greater urgency than ever before; yet basic questions remain. The Essay contributes to these conversations by articulating a comprehensive framework for progressive inheritance law that redresses long-term inequality.

Dead Men (And Women) Should Tell Tales: Narrative, Intent, And The Construction Of Wills, Karen J. Sneddon

Faculty Publications

The will is one of the most personal legal documents that an individual may ever create. The will is written in first person, present tense. Yet most wills reveal little of the person, the personality, or the personal. The inclusion of the testator’s relationships with people, entities, and property does little to convey the testator’s wishes, hopes, or fears. Some may assert that as a formal legal document, the will should be impersonal and be built using standardized, formulaic phrasing. Not only does such position overstate the accuracy of standardized, formulaic phrasing, but such position also ignores the ...

Study On The Compliance Of Islamic Investment Funds With The Provisions Of Islamic Law (Sharia) Within The Framework Of French Legislation, Rasha Hattab

Journal Sharia and Law

The religious nature of Islamic investment funds distinguishes them from the traditional ones by making their assets credible for Muslims investors on the one hand, and, on the other hand, obligating the Investment Services Providers to reassure investors about their effective religious compliance which constitutes a real challenge in the Occidental Countries. In this study, dedicated to the control of compliance of the Islamic Investment Funds with the Islamic Sharia in France, we will devote the first section for discussing the means of this control and simultaneously the role that the Sharia Supervisory Board could play in ensuring its effectiveness ...

The Law Of Trusts And Collective Action: A New Approach To Property Deadlocks, Amnon Lehavi

University of Cincinnati Law Review

This Article identifies the key role that trust law can play in resolving collective action problems pertaining to assets with multiple stakeholders. Devising a multi-beneficiary trust may serve as an effective institutional alternative, when the direct governance of an asset by its co-owners reaches a deadlock, and the partition of the asset among them is either impractical or inefficient.

The Article examines various case studies in which property may become deadlocked among multiple stakeholders, featuring either commons or anticommons problems. In the case of land, the need to assemble land from multiple owners for (re)development, or the task of ...

How To Sue An Asue? Closing The Racial Wealth Gap Through The Transplantation Of A Cultural Institution, Cyril A.L. Heron

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Asues, academically known as Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (or ROSCAs for short), are informal cultural institutions that are prominent in developing countries across the globe. Their utilization in those countries provide rural and ostracized communities with a means to save money and invest in the community simultaneously. Adoption of the asue into the United States could serve as the foundation by which to close the racial wealth gap. Notwithstanding the benefits, wholesale adoption of any asue model runs the risk of cultural rejection because the institution is foreign to the African American community.

Drawing upon principles of cultural and ...

Recent Amendments To The Interim Real Estate Registery Of The Emirate Of Dubai (Its Effects On The Legal Characterization In Off Plan Sale Contracts)

Journal Sharia and Law

RECENT AMENDMENTS TO THE INTERIM REAL ESTATE REGISTERY OF THE EMIRATE OF DUBAI (ITS EFFECTS ON THE LEGAL CHARACTERIZATION

IN OFF PLAN SALE CONTRACTS)

Dr. Yasser Al-Iftihat

Associate Professor of Civil Law College of Law, Al Ghurair University, United Arab Emirates

Abstract: The research discusses the regulations of selling off plan real estate units as stated on the Emirate of Dubai by the legislator who has regulated and imposed the subsequent amendments to the law in order to face the most significant challenge in the field of real estate development in the Emirate of Dubai, where distinguishes the real estate ...

The Role Of Trust Law Principles In Defining Public Trust Duties For Natural Resources, John C. Dernbach

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Public trusts for natural resources incorporate both limits and duties on governments in their stewardship of those natural resources. They exist in every state in the United States—in constitutional provisions, statutes, and in common law. Yet the law recognizing public trusts for natural resources may contain only the most basic provisions—often just a sentence or two. The purpose and terms of these public trusts certainly answer some questions about the limits and duties of trustees, but they do not answer all questions. When questions arise that the body of law creating or recognizing a public trust for natural ...

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Legal Complications Of Repatriation At The British Museum, Hannah R. Godwin

Washington International Law Journal

The British Museum has been the target of criticism around the world for its failure to repatriate controversial cultural property to their respective countries of origin. In 1753, a private collector left his collection to Great Britain if it agreed to build a public museum and designate a Board of Trustees whose duty was to protect the collection for the public. Statutorily incorporating the collector’s intent, Parliament passed legislation binding the Board of Trustees to abide by certain principles, including preserving the collection and prohibiting disposal of objects, except in very few circumstances. As such, the Museum is administrated ...

Final Report: Internship At Hull And Hull Llp, Samantha Henderson-Whaley

SASAH 4th Year Capstone and Other Projects: Publications

Over the summer of 2020 I completed a remote internship at Hull & Hull LLP, an estates law firm in Toronto, for the SASAH experiential learning course. Hull & Hull handles estates and trusts litigation. I worked on digitizing charts for a passing of accounts (which is a court audit of a fiduciary’s accounting) for which there have been a considerable number of objections that we had to either refute or attempt to resolve, or there would be a trial. I was responsible for linking evidentiary material to the existing charts in order to ensure that the information was presentable in ...

Interview: Robert Patterson, Bacilio Mendez

GGU Tax & Estate Planning Review

Dr. Marcia Ruben, Assistant Professor and Chair of GGU’s Graduate Management Program, speaks with Robert Patterson—an MS Taxation alumnus and Director and Worldwide Tax & Trade Controller at Microsoft—about his life and career.

Enough Is As Good As A Feast, Noah C. Chauvin

Seattle University Law Review

Ipse Dixit, the podcast on legal scholarship, provides a valuable service to the legal community and particularly to the legal academy. The podcast’s hosts skillfully interview guests about their legal and law-related scholarship, helping those guests communicate their ideas clearly and concisely. In this review essay, I argue that Ipse Dixit has made a major contribution to legal scholarship by demonstrating in its interview episodes that law review articles are neither the only nor the best way of communicating scholarly ideas. This contribution should be considered “scholarship,” because one of the primary goals of scholarship is to communicate new ...

Interview: Nathan Pastor On Barefoot V. Jennings, Bacilio Mendez Ii

GGU Tax & Estate Planning Review

In February 2020 (read: pre-COVID-19-pandemic and the California shelter-in-place order taking hold), I was lucky enough to sit down with Nathan Pastor (JD ’14, LLM ’16, right) to discuss a case that resulted in a seismic shift in California probate law—Barefoot v. Jennings.

Fiduciary Litigation In Louisiana: Mandataries, Succession Representatives, And Trustees, Elizabeth R. Carter

Louisiana Law Review

The article discusses fiduciary relationships and litigation issues on the estate-planning setting in Louisiana, as well as the roles of mandataries, trustees, and succession representatives.

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Estate Planning Choice Of Wealth Management Entity: The Limited Partnership As An Alternative To The Trust, Elaine H. Gagliardi

Faculty Law Review Articles

The substantial and steady increases in the amount a taxpayer can transfer free of federal estate, gift, and generation skipping transfer taxes1 makes transfer tax planning irrelevant when counseling more than 99.9% of Americans.2 Traditional estate planning structures set in place at a time when the estate tax impacted many more Americans may no longer achieve a client’s current estate planning goals. The seismic shift in the estate planning paradigm requires estate planners rethink use of planning structures in light of shifting client objectives. Evaluated in terms of these shifting objectives, the limited partnership may prove just ...

Quit Rent Rolls In Philadelphia County (Penn Family Estates), Due 1688/9, American Philosophical Society, Molly E. Nebiolo, Cynthia Heider

The Magazine of Early American Datasets (MEAD)

This dataset was created from a volume listing quit rents due in Philadelphia County, 1 March 1688/9, held within the Penn Family Estates Collection at the American Philosophical Society Library. Quit rents (also quitrents or quit-rents) were fees collected by proprietors of the British colonies, in this case William Penn, to reinforce power and ownership over the land rented by farmers. They also represented a way for the English Crown to keep hold over the colonies. The dataset lists names of individuals and their status (first purchaser, renter, etc.), quantity of land in acres, dates of survey and dates ...

Community-Driven Climate Solutions: How Public-Private Partnerships With Land Trusts Can Advance Climate Action, Jessica Grannis

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

In 2018 and 2019, several landmark developments demonstrated the failings of past efforts to address climate change and the need for new and more ambitious solutions. In October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”) released a dire report indicating that the window is rapidly closing for countries to dramatically reduce emissions in order to avoid the worst consequences of climate change and predicting dramatic consequences to the environment and public health if countries fail to take action; young activists started taking to the streets to demand more ambitious action to address climate change; and, at the 25th Conference ...

Kaestner Fails: The Way Forward, Mitchell M. Gans

William & Mary Business Law Review

This past term, the Supreme Court applied the Due Process Clause to prevent the states from closing down a tax strategy that employs out-of-state trusts. Many had hoped that the case would serve as a vehicle for the Court to overrule taxpayer-friendly precedents that make the strategy possible. But it failed. The question that emerges is whether the decision leaves the states with a path to address the strategy and thereby prevent it from being used to exacerbate issues of inequality. After examining the decision, this Article considers the options available to the states and then suggests a way forward.

Blockchain Wills, Bridget J. Crawford

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Blockchain technology has the potential to radically alter the way that people have executed wills for centuries. This Article makes two principal claims--one descriptive and the other normative. Descriptively, this Article suggests that traditional wills formalities have been relaxed to the point that they no longer serve the cautionary, protective, evidentiary, and channeling functions that scholars have used to justify strict compliance with wills formalities. Widespread use of digital technology in everyday communications has led to several notable cases in which individuals have attempted to execute wills electronically. These wills have had a mixed reception. Four states currently recognize electronic ...