Category Archives: Succession
Horton, Weisbord and Ryan, ‘The Trust Transfer Problem’
ABSTRACT For decades, a single tactic has dominated American estate planning. By transferring assets to a revocable living trust (‘rev trust’), individuals can bypass the notoriously slow, expensive, and public probate system. But because rev trusts operate privately, there is no data on how well they function. This Article conducts the first empirical study of […]
Harris Burton, ‘Salvation from the Purgatory Between Personhood and Property: Disinterring Evidence for Property Rights in Human Remains’
ABSTRACT This Note argues that next of kin have property rights in the remains of decedents, as opposed to a quasi-property right in their burial. Changing this distinction will allow courts to address wrongs committed against human remains through remedies traditionally available for harms to property, thereby incentivizing institutions, such as prisons, to exercise care […]
Daniel Monk, ‘“The reading of the will”: making inheritance law visual’
ABSTRACT Wills have lent themselves to more performative possibilities than any other legal document. They have been engraved, painted, written about and sung. Yet within legal scholarship these representations have been overlooked. Interpreting the Reading of the Will widely, this article demonstrates the tenacity of the will on artistic imagination and, at the same time, […]
Kimon Saitakis, ‘Tokenized Succession: Inheritance of DLT-Based Digital Assets in the European Legal Order’
ABSTRACT The inheritance of distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based digital assets – such as cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and tokenized claims – poses a formidable challenge to traditional civil law succession frameworks. Unlike conventional property, these digital assets are characterized by decentralization, pseudonymity, immutability and self-custody, features that complicate both their legal classification and their practical […]
Pawlowski and Brown, ‘A review of the factors determining discretionary relief from forfeiture under the Forfeiture Act 1982’
ABSTRACT The article considers the common law rule of forfeiture as it applies to cases of unlawful killing, including manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility, causing death by careless driving, suicide pacts and assisted suicide. Examines relevant factors from the emerging case law on the exercise of the court’s discretionary relief, under s 2(2) of the […]
Maria Andrianova, ‘Evolution of the Category of Fiduciarity’
ABSTRACT The article examines the evolution of the category of fiduciarity in inheritance relations from Roman private law to modern legal systems. Based on the analysis of Roman constructions of fiducia and fideicommissum, the essential core of fiduciarity is revealed – the duty of a person entrusted with power over another’s property to act exclusively […]
‘Less Freedom and More Equality’
Carla Spivack and Deborah Gordon, ‘Donative Freedom, Disrupted’, 91 Brooklyn Law Review (forthcoming, 2026), available at SSRN (5 February 2025). Donative freedom is the guiding principle of inheritance law. This is something that many of us who teach the subject tell students every semester, at the outset of a Wills and Trusts class. We keep […]
Horton, Weisbord and Ryan, ‘Trust Litigation’
ABSTRACT There is a blind spot at the center of American inheritance law. In the late twentieth century, revocable living trusts (rev trusts) replaced wills as the main estate planning tool. More recently, the widespread use of these mechanisms and the unprecedented amount of wealth passing between generations has reportedly caused an increase in trust […]
Frank Hernandez, ‘Inheritance And Indebtedness: The Sole Beneficiary’s Pro Se Battle Against Creditors’
ABSTRACT Creating a will is one of the most important things someone can do to protect the assets they have acquired over their working life and give those assets to their beneficiaries. With the shrinking family size and the rising cost of living, the likelihood of a will having a sole beneficiary also increases. Sole […]
Rzewuski and Rzewuska, ‘The public policy exception as grounds for refusing to recognize or enforce foreign court judgments in succession cases’
ABSTRACT The number of cross-border civil proceedings is on the rise and is likely to increase in the future. The above also applies to succession law regulating the statutory order of succession. Therefore, national courts adjudicating a succession case have to be familiar with and respect foreign laws indicated by the appropriate conflict-of-law rule. Significant […]