Family Property Law Cases And Materials on Wills, Trust And Future Interests (University Casebook Series)

Description

A forward looking casebook, Family Property Law focuses on new themes in family property law in the areas of wills, trusts, estates, and probates. The book recognizes the reform minded nature of the current era of family property law, including its changing notions of family and society, the acceptance of a partnership theory for assessing the financial aspects of marriage, and the need to reshape the law of donative transfers into a unity. The third edition presents the following new features: integrated coverage of the new Uniform Trust Code and of the American Law Institute approved parts of the new Restatements, important new case and statutory law, including Vermont s civil union statute and a sample certificate of civil union, the two Kuralt decisions of the Montana Supreme Court holding that Charles Kuralt s letter to his mistress constituted a holographic will, and fully integrated treatment of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, which ultimately repealed the estate tax and the generation-skipping transfer tax.

Reviews

Rating: 2 / 5
Date: 2006-01-16
Summary: "Imaginitive"

The Restatement 3rd of Property is the law almost nowhere. But this text treats it with almost as much respect as it does the Uniform Probate Code.

The reason? The authors have written a textbook devoted in substantial part to what the law should be. According to them.

In my T&E class, the result was that I had to learn the law of the UPC, the revised UPC, my jurisdiction (Georgia) and the imaginative if inaccurately named Restatement 3d of Property (innacurate in that, in many places, it "restates" the law only as it exists in its authors' minds.)

Add to this the fact that this book is heavy on cases that do not present the majority rule on an issue but serve only to illustrate a rule the authors prefer. And then the long note sections that, instead of telling me some useful law, begin with questions such as "Query whether Judge Smith was correct in finding that . . ."

Ugh. If you intend to design your T&E course to teach the law, I humbly recommend another text. If you prefer lecturing students on what the law should be (and you happen to prefer a court-tailored outcome to the one dictated by a document's plain meaning at almost every turn), then by all means, choose this text.