Category Archives: Succession
Yair Listokin and John Morley, ‘A Survey of Preferences for Estate Distribution at Death Part 2: Children and Other Beneficiaries’
ABSTRACT This is the second of two papers presenting the results of a nationally representative survey of 9,000 American adults in which we asked people how they want to distribute their property when they die. In the first paper, we focused on gifts to spouses and partners. In this second paper, we focus on gifts […]
Yair Listokin and John Morley, ‘A Survey of Preferences for Estate Distribution at Death Part 1: Spouses and Partners’
ABSTRACT This is the first of two papers presenting the results of a nationally representative survey of 9,000 American adults in which we asked people how they want to distribute their property when they die. In this first paper, we focus on gifts to spouses and nonmarital romantic partners. We find that people give much […]
Prue Vines, ‘Australia’s (Slow) Experiment with Indigenous Customary Law in Intestacy’
ABSTRACT Australia’s treatment of its Indigenous people in terms of dispossession of land is well known. What is thought of less is Australia’s lack of attention to the civil law needs of its Indigenous people. In the last twenty years there has finally been some attention paid to the issues Indigenous people face in respect […]
David Horton and Reid Kress Weisbord, ‘The New Undue Influence’
ABSTRACT The doctrine of undue influence has long been the problem child of inheritance law. Undue influence, a hazy combination of fraud and duress, supposedly invalidates bequests that a beneficiary obtained by overriding the volition of a vulnerable testator or settlor. But because relationships are complex, concepts like free will are slippery, and challenges to […]
Simon Stern, ‘Blackstone’s Page and Trollope’s Jurisprudence: From Doctrine to Fiction’
ABSTRACT This book chapter explores connections between law and literature by attending to print format, page layout, and typography. It considers William Blackstone’s use of the colon in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69), showing how he exploits the sign as a means of achieving the balance, rationality, and clarity that he seeks […]
Adam Mestyan and Rezk Nori, ‘The Probate Regime: Enchanted Bureaucracy, Islamic Law, and the Capital of Orphans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt’
ABSTRACT In this article, we explore the ‘probate regime’, an administrative field of government activity of legally transferring, taxing, and administering bequests. As an example, we study the changes of the Egyptian probate regime in a longue durée perspective, with a focus on the nineteenth century when Egypt was a sub-Ottoman ‘khedivate’. We argue that […]
‘Save Our Wills’
In 1942 a bombing raid on Exeter destroyed the cathedral’s probate archive, and the pre-1858 wills of Devon, Somerset and Cornwall went up in flames. Their destruction left a large hole in our knowledge of the ordinary inhabitants of south-west England between the Middle Ages and the mid-19th century. The Ministry of Justice is currently […]
Alice Kwak and others, ‘Validity Assessment of Legal Will Statements as Natural Language Inference’
ABSTRACT This work introduces a natural language inference (NLI) dataset that focuses on the validity of statements in legal wills. This dataset is unique because: (a) each entailment decision requires three inputs: the statement from the will, the law, and the conditions that hold at the time of the testator’s death; and (b) the included […]
Claudia Lima Marques and Lucas Lixinski, ‘Family and Succession Law’
ABSTRACT This chapter describes the current state of family and succession law in Brazil. The underlying principle behind these bodies of law is a move towards secularization, which is influenced by feminist social movements, and a lessening of church power during the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985. The military dictatorship occupied […]
Tal Morse and Michael Birnhack, ‘The Continuity Principle of Digital Remains’
ABSTRACT The digitization of social interactions and daily activities means that multiple aspects of our daily lives are documented and stored, and social interactions leave digital traces. The accumulated data does not evaporate upon death, and questions about posthumous privacy and impression management arise. Drawing on eight focus groups comprised of Israeli internet users from […]