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...

This Article presents the first empirical study of the domestic jurisdictional competition for trust funds. To allow donors to exploit a loophole in the federal estate tax, since 1986 a host of states have abolished the Rule Against Perpetuities as applied to interests in trust. To allow...

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,...

By abolishing the Rule Against Perpetuities, twenty-one states have validated perpetual trusts. The prevailing view among scholars is that enactment of the generation skipping transfer (GST) tax in 1986 prompted the movement to abolish the Rule by conferring a salient tax advantage on long-term...

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...

Americans now hold trillions of dollars in individual retirement savings accounts, raising concerns about conflicts of interest among financial advisers who provide advice to retirement savers. Prompted by these concerns, in April 2016 the Department of Labor promulgated a rule that imposes on...