Category Archives: Succession
Adam Hirsch, ‘Will as Thing’
ABSTRACT Properly viewed, wills are two things in one: they are tangible objects and bundles of rights. Scholars have long contemplated property and contract from this dual perspective. Thus far, no one has examined wills through the same bifocal lens. This Article endeavors to do so. It argues that the physicality of wills has often […]
Thomas Mitchell, ‘Book Excerpt: Heirs’ Property and the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act’
ABSTRACT This article is an excerpt of a book chapter of mine from a 2022 ABA book titled Heirs’ Property and the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act: Challenges, Solutions, and Historic Reform, a book for which I served as the lead co-editor. The excerpt demonstrates that so-called heirs’ property is a type of family […]
Prue Vines, ‘First Nations Heritage: Land Rights, Cultural Integrity and Succession Law’
INTRODUCTION … In this chapter I address the issues created by the failure to properly address the needs of Indigenous Australians in respect of succession law since the common law arrived on our shores. We all know well the failings of the common law in its inability to recognise the sophistication of the First Nations […]
‘Discretioners’
James Toomey, ‘Executor Discretion’, 110 Iowa Law Review (forthcoming, 2025), available at SSRN. I hereby grant my executor the power to alter my will to reflect my most likely recent intent. Notwithstanding the mysteries that can attend multiple aspects of estate planning, some things – such as the precepts that deeds are not wills, revocation is […]
Joseph Padjune, ‘A Constructive Trust is Not Enough – Enacting a Slayer Statute to Better Protect a Decedent’s Heirs’
ABSTRACT This Comment explores how Texas’s common law constructive trust solution used to address the ‘slayer problem’ (the problem that occurs when a person kills an individual they would inherit from) has some substantial limitations and explains how this system would be enhanced by enacting a complementary slayer statute. The current constructive trust doctrine fails […]
Derwent Coshott, ‘Tendency, purpose and intention: construing the proper function of the public policy restraints’
INTRODUCTION The public policy restraints represent a series of rules operating in the context of private law arrangements which forbid such arrangements from encouraging conduct that the law regards as being against the social interest. These include rules that a contract, trust, will etc must not promote immoral conduct, impermissibly restrain a person from marriage […]
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 […]
Gordon and Spivack, ‘Donative Freedom, Disrupted’
ABSTRACT You can do what you want with your property at death – and after – because it is ‘yours’. This is the ‘fundamental guiding principle’ of American succession law today. Despite occasional criticism over the years, for example, that it goes too far in allowing parents to disinherit children, legal scholars, courts, law reformers, […]
Weisbord and Sterk, ‘Joint Bank Accounts: Who Needs Them?’
ABSTRACT Joint bank accounts, once known as a ‘poor man’s will’, emerged more than a century ago as a probate avoidance device. This Article contends that joint accounts no longer serve a useful estate planning function, and they pose an unacceptably high risk to banking consumers because the legal framework governing lifetime ownership rights is […]
Call for Papers: Estates, Trusts and Pensions Journal conference, Vancouver, 19-20 February 2026
The Estates, Trusts and Pensions Journal is inviting paper proposals for a conference, to be held February 19-20, 2026 at the Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia. We invite paper proposals on any theme having to do with Estates, Trusts or Pensions. Here follows a non-exclusive list of potential topics, divided into broader […]