The Trusts and Estates course is about the law of gratuitous transfers at death, that is, the law of succession. Lately such courses have come to cover both probate succession by will and intestacy, and non-probate succession by inter vivos trust, pay-on-death contract, and other such will...

Trust has long been a competitor of corporation as a form of business organization. Though corporation today dominates trust for operating enterprises, trust dominates corporation in certain specialized niches. The market value of these niches measures in the trillions of dollars. Yet the modern...

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, modi-fication and termination, settlor standing, fiduciary litigation,...

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

Directed trusts have become a familiar feature of trust practice in spite of considerable legal uncertainty about them. Fortunately, the Uniform Law Commission has just finished work on the Uniform Directed Trust Act (UDTA), a new uniform law that offers clear solutions to the many legal...

The trust has long competed with the corporation as a form of business organization. Although today the corporate form dominates the trust for the organization of operating enterprises, the trust dominates the corporation in a handful of specialized niches. The market value of these niches...

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...

This chapter restates the economic theory of fiduciary law, making several fresh contributions. First, it elaborates on earlier work by clarifying the agency problem that is at the core of all fiduciary relationships. In consequence of this common economic structure, there is a common doctrinal...

This is a transcript of a roundtable discussion between Robert Pritzker of The Marmon Group, Inc., Vice-Chancellor Jack Jacobs of the Delaware Court of Chancery, and Law Professors William Carney, Richard Painter, and Robert Sitkoff, with Professor Carney serving as moderator. The general topic...