Category Archives: Succession
‘Clarifying the Doctrine of Probate Standing’
David Horton, ‘Probate Standing’, 122 Michigan Law Review (forthcoming 2024), available at SSRN (August 7, 2023). Probate cases often arise from a complicated web of relationships between the decedent and family members, friends, caretakers, fiduciaries, and other parties. When the facts of a given case are especially complex, it is sometimes helpful to draw a […]
Adam Hirsch, ‘Beyond Privity of Blood: Intestacy and Charity’
ABSTRACT When individuals die without leaving a will, the law of intestacy functions to distribute their estates to a surviving spouse and/or close blood relatives. Yet, this default regime fails to account for the possibility that some individuals wish to allocate part of their estates to charity. Drawing on empirical evidence, including original data presented […]
Diane Kemker, ‘Pro-Natalism in Probate Law’
ABSTRACT ‘Pro-natalism’ is a term that has been variously used to describe any and all government policies that favor birth, babies, children, families, and population growth, as well as more focused laws that incentivize childbirth; burden, ban, or criminalize abortion and/or contraception; and otherwise disfavor the childless. Whether and to what extent US law is […]
William Davis, ‘Property, Wills, and Estates in The Count of Monte Cristo: A Comparison Between the Napoleonic Code and Mississippi Law’
ABSTRACT In the literary classic The Count of Monte Cristo, the hero inherits a treasure after escaping the prison in which he was wrongly confined. The central question this comment seeks to answer is, ‘Was this inheritance transfer legal?’ From this starting point, two different legal regimes are analyzed. Beginning with a discussion of the […]
Jamie McWilliam, ‘Toward a New Generation of “Caregiver Statutes”’
ABSTRACT Probate law has long seen tension between protecting a testator’s freedom of disposition and protecting them from fraud or undue influence. A handful of states have attempted to strike this balance, at least partially, using ‘caregiver statutes’, which provide a presumption of undue influence for gifts to caregivers. Most academic critiques of these statutes […]
Carl Islam, ‘Mediating probate and trust disputes – process challenges and tools: part 1’
ABSTRACT While it is not the function of a mediator to speak truth to power, a mediator can facilitate the re-framing of a dispute as an opportunity, by enabling each participant to think about what is important to them, so that the participants can jointly agree upon a ‘methodology’, ie a ‘road map’ for convergence […]
Kristine Knaplund, ‘Is a Will Better than Intestacy?’
… Scholars argued that the relaxation of such standards would lead to more wills, thus allowing decedents to choose who received their property and what specific items they received. The result, they maintained, would be less litigation over the representative’s actions because the testator had designated an executor, and a shorter, faster probate process with […]
Jeffrey Cooper, ‘An Unclear Burden: Proving Undue Influence in Connecticut’
ABSTRACT In will contests, one party often will make an allegation of ‘undue influence’, suggesting that another party procured an unnatural share of the decedent’s estate by overcoming the decedent’s free will. As this paper explores, Connecticut law is not clear on the question of what burden of proof is required to prove a claim […]
Brenda Gibson, ‘The Heirs’ Property Problem: Racial Caste Origins and Systemic Effects in the Black Community’
ABSTRACT This article enters the conversation about Black poverty in a new way – discussing the phenomenon of the heirs’ property ownership model as an impediment to Black wealth. As discussed in this article, heirs’ property is ‘family-owned land that is jointly owned by descendants of a deceased person’ by intestacy. This model of property […]
Masaki Iwasaki, ‘Digital Cloning of the Dead: Exploring the Optimal Default Rule’
ABSTRACT We conducted a survey experiment in the US to analyze how the consent or dissent of a deceased individual influences the social acceptability of digital resurrection. The results showed a substantial relative treatment effect of consent versus dissent, with a 2-point difference in acceptability on a 5-point scale. When the deceased had consented, 58% […]