This Article argues that lawmakers ought to recategorize inheritance law and contracts law as cognate bodies of doctrine within a larger genus of transfers law. The Article proceeds to examine comparatively the justifications for freedom of contracts and freedom of testation, concluding that...

Whereas benefactors typically create trusts that provide for one or more individuals, some instead create trusts to accomplish or to promote purposes. Historically, trust law divided purpose trusts into a trio of categories, based on the sort of purpose the benefactor had in mind. Trusts for...

This Article explores the problems that arise when a will fails to dispose of an individual's entire estate, so that she dies partially testate and partially intestate. The questions then raised include (1) whether provisions contained in the will purporting to redefine the individual's...

This Article explores the inheritance rights of individuals situated at the fringes of marital relationships—fiancés, spouses who are in the process of divorcing, and permanently separated spouses. The Article examines whether these categories of individuals ought to enjoy rights to forced...

This Article explores the panoply of state-of-mind rules in inheritance law. In areas of law concerned with wrongdoing, consideration of mental states achieves specific deterrence and moral justice. By comparison, in the inheritance realm, I argue that consideration of mental states can serve to...

This contribution to a special issue of the University of Queensland Law Review devoted to "My Favorite Law Article" reviews a classic article by Ashbel Gulliver & Catherine Tilson, "The Classification of Gratuitous Transfers," published in volume 51 of the Yale Law Journal in 1941. Although the...

Under current law, bequests to beneficiaries who predecease the testator “lapse” to the beneficiary of the residuary, unless they are preserved for the descendants of predeceased beneficiaries under an “antilapse” statute. The beneficiaries covered by antilapse statutes vary from state...

The beneficiary of an inheritance has the right to disclaim (i.e., decline) it, within limits ordinarily set by state law. This Article examines situations where a beneficiary’s right to disclaim might instead be governed by federal law, as a matter of both existing doctrine and public policy....

By tradition, gifts, wills, and contracts are formalized according to protocols established within each legal category. This Article examines the policies that underlie these "formalizing rules" and concludes that the utility of those rules depends fundamentally on the background conditions...

This Article explores the problem of construing what I term “defective catastrophe clauses” in wills. Defective catastrophe clauses provide for the contingency that a beneficiary will die simultaneously, or in a common calamity, with the testator but neglect to allow for the possibility that...