The organizing principle of the American law of succession is freedom of disposition. This book chapter surveys freedom of disposition in American succession law--intestacy, wills, trusts, and nonprobate transfers. The chapter also considers the main limits on freedom of disposition, focusing on...

This chapter summarizes the four areas of practical innovation of the Uniform Directed Trust Act (UDTA). The first is a careful allocation of fiduciary duties. The UDTA’s basic approach is to take the law of trusteeship and attach it to whichever person holds the powers of trusteeship, even if...

The economic analysis of property has made progress in areas of property closest to contracts and torts, where the assumption that legal rules can be studied in isolation has some plausibility. Property law is a system, and economic analysis can be used to capture the role of traditional notions...

In a trust decanting, a trustee who under the terms of a trust (the first trust) has a discretionary power over distribution uses that power to distribute the trust property to a new trust (the second trust) with updated provisions, leaving behind the sediment of the first trust’s stale...

In a full-information, zero transactions costs world, the degree of protection afforded to an entitlement does not affect the likelihood of efficient trade. In reality, imperfect information is often inevitable. Specifically, a party will usually have incomplete information about fairness norms...

Law is for humans. Humans suffer from cognitive limitations. Legal institutions can help humans by making these limitations irrelevant. This experiment shows that strong property rights serve this function. In theory, efficient outcomes obtain even without strong property rights. In a...

This article addresses the proposition advanced by academic and press commentators that European corporation law promotes stockholder welfare better than its U.S. counterpart. Those who express that view often point to the stronger rights afforded to stockholders under the laws of the European...

Black & Gilson (1998) argued that an IPO-welcoming stock market stimulates venture deals by enabling VCs to give founders a valuable “call option on control”. We study 18,000 startups to investigate the value of this option. Among firms that IPO, 60% of founders are no longer CEO. With...

Preemptive rights are thought to protect minority shareholders from cheap-stock tunneling by a controlling shareholder. We show that preemptive rights, while making cheap-stock tunneling more difficult, cannot prevent it when asymmetric information about the value of the offered shares makes it...

Trustees of pensions, charities, and personal trusts invest tens of trillions of dollars of other people's money subject to a sacred trust known in the law as fiduciary duty. Recently, these trustees have come under increasing pressure to use environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors...