AALS gratefully acknowledges The Froebe Group as a Silver Sponsor of the Annual Meeting.
Trusts and Estates is
a far-reaching and broad-based legal discipline that impacts private citizens’
decisions about mortality, property, and personal relationships. Many aspects
of trusts and estates are based on legislators’, judges’, and law reformers’
speculations about donors' preferred intentions. Yet, estate planning
documents, whether created by lawyers or by donors themselves, provide a window
into history, society, and human interaction. Although there are a handful of
decades-old and oft-cited studies describing evidence derived from will vaults
about what ordinary people had decided to do with their belongings, until
recently relatively few trusts and estates scholars had explored empirical
evidence in this field. Over the past few years, there has been a renewed
interest in analyzing historical and empirical evidence derived from court
files, will vaults, tax and other records, and surveys of individuals and
institutions. Scholars have used this material to revisit some of long accepted
assumptions and unanswered questions that underlie trusts and estates theory,
doctrine, values, and practice. This panel will explore this ongoing historical
and empirical research as it interrogates existing ideas about preferred
default rules, interpretation standards, donor and beneficiary preferences,
fiduciary norms, and wealth accumulation and transmission more generally.
Business
meeting at program conclusion.