This Article examines the nature, origin, and policy soundness of the tort of interference with inheritance. We argue that the tort should be repudiated because it is conceptually and practically unsound. Endorsed by the Second Restatement of Torts and recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in a...

There is broad consensus that the law of conflict of trust laws is outdated. Both the American Law Institute and the Uniform Law Commission have initiated reform projects to address this obsolescence. But there is not a consensus around what went wrong or how to fix it. This article, prepared...

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...

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 prudent investor rule, enacted in every state over the last 30 years, is the centerpiece of trust investment law. Repudiating the prior law’s emphasis on avoiding risk, the rule reorients trust investment toward risk management in accordance with modern portfolio theory. The rule directs a...

In both the publicly-traded corporation and the private donative trust a crucial task is to minimize the agency costs that arise from the separation of risk-bearing and management. But where the law of corporate governance evolved in the shadow of capital-market checks on agency costs, trust...

This Article develops an agency costs theory of the law of private trusts, focusing chiefly on donative trusts. The agency costs approach offers fresh insights into recurring problems in trust law including, among others, modification and termination, settlor standing, fiduciary litigation,...

In April 2019, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) on the definition of "fiduciary capacity" regarding "directed trusts." The ANPR references in particular the Uniform Directed Trust Act (UDTA) (Unif. Law Comm'n 2017). We...

In this chapter, prepared for The Oxford Handbook of New Private Law, we identify the principal ways in which the common law trust has been used as an instrument of private ordering in American practice. We argue that in both law and function, contemporary American trust law has divided into...