Bridget J Crawford (Pace University School of Law) recently published Trust Law’s Beneficiary Problem: Trusts for Purposes, Pets, and Artificial Intelligence Companions, July 2026. Provided below is the Abstract:
The classical trust doctrine holds that every trust must have identifiable beneficiaries with standing to enforce its terms. Yet contemporary law permits trusts for animals,…
The oldest Generation Xers are entering their 60s, an age by which most Americans are expected to have made some decisions about what will happen to their money and property when they die.
But most Gen Xers, it seems, aren’t quite ready to make those choices.
Three-fifths of Gen Xers have no estate planning documents, according to the …
A Mesa family says they received an unexpected delivery while preparing to lay their grandmother to rest.
Dorothy Kuspis, known as “Nanny” to her granddaughter Ashleigh Wegner, died May 27 at 98. Wegner said her family expected the loss, but the reality still hit hard.
In the days that followed, the family began making arrangements,…
The Trump administration wants to formalize the process for recording whether Medicare patients want to be kept alive if they become incapacitated.
Health providers have been required to ask about living wills and other “advance directives” since the early 1990s. But the questions are often skipped — or become a box-check in the admissions process.…
Sharing your wishes for medical care and end-of-life decisions should be standard practices for people as they age. But for people with dementia, the usual advance directives—such as a living will and a durable power of attorney for healthcare—may not be detailed enough.
That’s why documents called dementia directives are gaining popularity, to help people…
Investing based on environmental, social and corporate-governance factors has taken a hit over the past several years amid a backlash against so-called woke policies and weakness in ESG funds’ performance. But proponents insist it isn’t dead.
The backlash has encompassed red-state legal actions and Trump administration moves against climate-change measures and workforce diversity, among other things.…
When tech executive Tony Hsieh died at age 46 in a tragic 2020 fire after battling drug abuse, it was believed he had left behind a fortune valued at hundreds of millions of dollars and no will.
But last March, seven typed pages, apparently containing the former Zappos chief executive’s final wishes, surfaced via snail mail to…
A larger role for the state inevitably raises a practical question: who should pay for it? This lies at the heart of economist Gabriel Zucman’s We Need to Tax Billionaires (Basic Books £9.99, $13.35). The Paris School of Economics professor — who has become a star of the left — lays out a concise case…
Just months before he died last year aged 98, Goh Cheng Liang, one of Singapore’s richest men, made six of his grandchildren billionaires.
The Nippon Paint tycoon, who built his business empire from a single shop trading cheap goods bought from the British Army, was worth $13bn at the time of his death.
But instead…
Birthrates in much of the developed world are at record lows, but there’s one demographic group that’s exploring new frontiers of fertility: ultrawealthy men. Deploying nearly limitless resources, a small number of them are reproducing at such an extraordinary scale and pace that they’re exploding previous notions of what a family is. At a moment…
