For decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has insisted that forcing a plaintiff to arbitrate — rather than allowing her to litigate — does not affect the outcome of a dispute. Recently, the Court has invoked this “parity assumption” to expand arbitral jurisdiction. Reasoning that it does not...

Hundreds of millions of consumer and employment contracts include arbitration clauses, class arbitration waivers, and other terms that modify the rules of litigation. These provisions ride the wake of the Supreme Court’s expansive interpretation of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA). For...

Recently, “probate lenders” have started to advance cash to heirs and beneficiaries in return for part of their interest in a pending decedent's estate. This Article advances our understanding of this phenomenon by analyzing an original dataset of 1,119 probate matters from San Francisco....

Although most testators hire lawyers, others draft their own wills. Some try to comply with the Wills Act, which requires testamentary instruments to be signed by the testator and by two witnesses. Some create holographic wills, which are valid in about half of American states, and must be in...

For more than 150 years, companies called “heir hunters” have operated in the shadows of the court system. Heir hunters monitor probate filings to identify intestate decedents who have missing or unknown relatives. They then perform genealogical research, locate the decedent's kin, and offer...

Californians will inherit hundreds of billions of dollars in the next two decades. Yet Probate Code section 21350(a)(6) - the state's unique quot;care custodianquot; provision - casts a long shadow over this unprecedented transfer of wealth. Section 21350 creates a virtually unrebuttable...