This Article argues that pets should inherit. For many Americans today, their pets, not their human family members, are their nearest and dearest. In earlier work, I have argued that American inheritance law is trapped in an outdated family paradigm. That paradigm assumes that the decedent's...

This symposium paper, originally presented at the September 19, 2008 NYU Tax Law Review Symposium on inheritance taxation, begins to examine what it might mean for the law to protect a "right to use one's resources to benefit one's family." The paper draws on historical debates over inheritance...

This essay discusses common law, equity and statutory rules governing gratuitous transfers of assets in the United States and Great Britain. One of the recurring questions of inheritance law is how to increase the chances of reaching the result the transferor wanted. Sometimes in tension with...