In its recently completed Restatement (Third) of Property, Wills and Other Donative Transfers, the American Law Institute determines that the distinction between will interpretation and will construction is no longer tenable. The distinction has been prominent in the American will interpretation...

Much of the current groundswell of support for heterosexual-only marriage in the United States arises from the belief that children do best when raised by their married, biological parents. This sense of what marriage and biological ties mean to children individually and to society as a whole...

Fertility tourism is a phenomenon that has received a great deal of media attention recently as the cost of in vitro fertilization in the West skyrockets and countries enact laws that drastically curtail women's access to assisted reproduction. Professor Storrow examines the relationship between...

To promote the protection of families, succession law diminishes the power of testation in a variety of ways that shield surviving spouses and children from disinheritance. This article conducts a survey of the law in the fifty states, five main territories, and the District of Columbia and...

A primary goal of the law of wills is to carry out the testator's intent. However, when a testator dies leaving a succession of wills or having expressed to an attorney his or her plan to execute a new will, ascertaining the testator's intent can be difficult. The problem is especially...

This Article examines the rule of lapse in wills law, discusses how efforts to reform the damage it does has led to the doctrine of anti-lapse, and advocates an alternative approach. In contrast to the requirement of survivorship of beneficiaries in wills law, I argue that testators do not have...

Infertility is a devastating global malady triggering worldwide demand for a vast array of reproduction assisting technologies. Infertility is particularly devastating those "pronatalist" societies marked by high rates of infertility and large disparities in access to medical services. Poverty...

This article questions whether wills law’s disapproval of partial intestacy rests on defensible assumptions about testamentary intent. After examining the causes of and antidotes to partial intestacy, I make three primary points. First, the presumption against intestacy applies only to wills...

The testamentary scheme, a poorly understood interpretative tool used by courts to determine the meaning of a will’s dispositive provisions, is insufficiently theorized in both case law and scholarly commentary. Based on a painstaking study of testamentary schemes in context, in this article I...