Trusts and Estates

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Trusts and Estates is a broad-based discipline that impacts private citizens’ decisions about sex, death, and taxes. In individuals’ lives, this field is like an operating system that quietly runs in the background, but in reality organizes and informs the end user’s experience, often without the end user’s full awareness. In practice, the field sits at the crossroads of other legal disciplines such as family law, property law, elder law, and tax law. In the academy, it is caught between the practical and theoretical—a microcosm of the questions at the heart of debates about the value and normative objectives of a legal education. Yet, T&E seems to be under–theorized and marginalized in the academy. Therefore, this panel will interrogate T&E’s unruly nature, entertaining inquiries about the intersectionality of gender, race, sexual orientation, and class; the pervasiveness of succession law in aligned fields; its history of adaptation to changing social norms; and the development and evolution of law reform in this area. The panel will explore new visions for the field and frameworks that disrupt and reimagine the field.