Category Archives: Succession
Ryan, Horton and Weisbord, ‘Uncontested Trusts in Court’
ABSTRACT Supposedly, trusts transmit wealth privately and only require judicial intervention if they spark litigation. However, we assembled a dataset of 1,431 trust filings from a seven year period in San Francisco Superior Court and found that 971 (68%) did not involve a dispute. This Article describes why these uncontested trusts ended up in the […]
David Sheldon, ‘A deathbed gift of registered land: a comment on Rahman v Hassan ’
The doctrine of Donatio mortis causa (DMC), otherwise known as deathbed gifts, has developed to allow a donor to make a gift of property to someone outside of their will, and the formalities contained in the Wills Act 1837 s 9, which is conditional upon death. For a deathbed gift to take effect, King v […]
Call for Abstracts: The Law of Succession and the Wills Bill: Selwyn College Cambridge, 13 April 2026
The organisers seek abstracts of research papers concerning the draft Wills Bill 2025 and the Law Commission’s consultation and reports in this matter. As ever a combination of different perspectives will allow us to understand the policy choices in the Bill, those provisions that arguably ought to be in the Bill, and the problems solved, […]
Ronald Scalise, ‘The Nonprobate “Civil” War in Louisiana, Part I: PODs and TODs, OMG!’
INTRODUCTION Louisiana is in the midst of a war – a quiet and cold ‘civil’ war between traditional forces of inheritance law that bring about the orderly transfer of property at death and the rogue forces of inter-vivos relations that have final effect at death. The former is the domain of traditional civilian succession law, […]
Rzewuski and Rzewuska, ‘The public policy exception as grounds for refusing to apply foreign law in succession cases’
ABSTRACT Increasing migration flows in Europe and the world will contribute to a rise in cross-border succession proceedings. As a result, when hearing a succession case, a domestic court should not only be familiar with, but should also apply the foreign law indicated by an authoritative conflict-of-law rule in the same manner that the foreign […]
Harris and Jefferson, ‘On the Trusts and Succession (Scotland) Bill: Modernisation and Transformation’
ABSTRACT The proposed reform under the Trusts and Succession (Scotland) Bill seeks to put a certain view of the modern function of trusts law on a legislative footing. It takes significant inspiration from jurisdictions which have a predominantly commercial trust regime. Two types of reform are evident in the Bill. At times it modernises the […]
Amin, Gholami and Guerriero, ‘Endogenous Kinship Institutions’
ABSTRACT Kinship structures the patterns of human relationships within the family, whereby matrilineal succession is believed to weaken both the males’ authority and their incentives to cooperate. To evaluate this conjecture, we study a society equally split in males and females interested in maximizing the return on their joint investment by selecting property rights shaping […]
Natalie Banta Lynner, ‘The Price Of Privacy At Death’
ABSTRACT In the United States, privacy at death is not a right; privacy at death is a privilege purchased through the use of a trust. The legal system grants privacy at death but only to those who can afford it. The vast majority of Americans, those who devise their assets through wills or die intestate, […]
Magaña and González-Ricoy, ‘Intergenerational Subjection’
ABSTRACT Can the dead subject later generations to their will? Legal and political philosophers have long worried about this question. But some have recently argued that subjection between generations that do not overlap is impossible. Against these views, we offer an account of this kind of subjection and the conditions under which it may occur […]
Meghan Finn, ‘Substantive Equality in the Private Sphere: Developments in South African Law on Testamentary Discrimination’
ABSTRACT The right to equality in South African law gives rise to duties borne by both the state and private actors. In the law of succession, this constrains private testators’ powers to discriminate. Doctrinal developments bear this out: in King v De Jager and Wilkinson v Crawford, a majority of the Constitutional Court extended the […]