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...

This article calls attention to the Department of Labor's imposition of the “prudent investor rule” on financial advisers to retirement savers. The article also canvasses the customary role of an investment policy statement in promoting compliance with the prudent investor rule by...

Trustees and other investment fiduciaries of pensions, charities, and personal trusts, and those who advise them, face increasing pressure to rely on ESG factors in the investment management of tens of trillions of dollars of other people's money. At the same time, however, confusion abounds...

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 book chapter, prepared for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Fiduciary Law, canvasses the fiduciary principles applicable to a trustee of a donative, irrevocable private trust subject. The focus is on prevailing American law. The chapter examines (a) the trigger for finding a trust...

This book chapter, prepared for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Fiduciary Law, canvasses the fiduciary duties other than the primary duties of loyalty and care. The core claim is that these other, subsidiary duties are field-specific elaborations of the primary duties of loyalty and care that...

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...