Category Archives: Succession
Mariusz Załucki, ‘Preparation of Wills in Times of COVID-19 Pandemic – Selected Observations’
ABSTRACT Pandemic time is a situation of increased human deaths, which cannot be left without the influence and interest of the law of succession. Some legislators have prepared and enacted appropriate facilities for the use of formal instruments for disposing of property upon death specifically for the pandemic period. The author looks at these solutions […]
Wilson, Tilse, White and Rosenman, ‘What Is “Fair and Reasonable”? Norms and Strategies Guiding the Distribution of Assets by Testators Who Have an Adult Child With Intellectual Disability’
ABSTRACT Background: Parents making a will most commonly distribute assets evenly to adult children. How parents of an adult child with an intellectual disability use wills to plan for future care and support has had limited policy, practice and research attention. Method: This research reports on the perceptions of 20 parents regarding the impact of […]
‘Video wills “risky and unnecessary”, solicitors claim
“Video-witnessed wills are dangerous, unnecessary and will ‘inevitably’ cause a rise in inheritance disputes, some solicitors have warned following the government’s announcement of an emergency change in the law. The Ministry of Justice announced on Saturday that a statutory instrument allowing wills to be witnessed remotely in England and Wales will be laid in September […]
Adam Hirsch, ‘Waking the Dead: An Empirical Analysis of Revival of Wills’
ABSTRACT The problem of revival arises when a testator executes a first will, subsequently executes a second will that functions to revoke the first one by subsequent executed writing, and then later revokes the second will by act. Does this sequence of events reinstate the first will (‘revival’) or leave the testator intestate (‘anti-revival’)? Most […]
Katheleen Guzman, ‘Wills Speak’
INTRODUCTION … Part II explores how a duly executed will (or even failed attempt) can hold legal consequence long before its maker dies and expectancies vest. As such, ‘nascent’ wills actually do have much to say, and rightly so, which is a reality that underdetermined internalization of the ‘no will speaks’ conclusion may have obscured. […]
Alexander Boni-Saenz, ‘Empirical Inheritance Law’
ABSTRACT Empirical legal scholars tell it like it is. The nature of the ‘it’ that we might want to know about varies significantly by legal field, however, and it also differs based on one’s scholarly position within that field. This Comment explores the major ways that empirical legal scholarship can be valuable to those of […]
‘Legacy Control’
Andrew Gilden, The Social Afterlife, 33 Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 229 (2020), available at SSRN. The COVID-19 crisis has compelled many of us to move our lives (further) online, creating new social interactions and communities, as well as a larger digital footprint. The pandemic has also forced us to confront the risks and […]
‘I do declare! Could a test case on remote witnessing wills be brought before death?’
“My last two posts have looked at the issue of will-making during the coronavirus pandemic, and the difficulties of socially distant witnessing, and some of the proposals for reform of the law of wills and the options for a temporary solution to the difficulties faced by testators during the pandemic. In this post, I address […]
‘Where There’s a Will in England, There’s a Way’
“Prodded by the coronavirus, thousands are making or updating their estate arrangements, but an archaic law requiring two witnesses in person is forcing people to take drastic measures …” (more) [Benjamin Mueller, New York Times, 28 April] First posted 2020-04-29 08:41:55
Richard Storrow, ‘The Secret Life of Testamentary Schemes’
ABSTRACT The testamentary scheme, a poorly understood interpretative tool used by courts to determine the meaning of a will’s dispositive provisions, is insufficiently theorized in both case law and scholarly commentary. Based on a painstaking study of testamentary schemes in context, in this article I raise and defend three propositions: (1) a testamentary scheme is […]