CFP: Wills, Trusts, and Estates Meets Gender, Race, and Class

Carla Spivack of Oklahoma City University School of Law has posted a call for papers for the conference “Wills, Trusts and Estates Meets Gender, Race and Class,” which will be in Oklahoma City on September 27-28, 2013. Cribbing now from the CFP:

This conference seeks to bring the insights of progressive property theory to the area of inheritance and succession law and will address the many points of intersection between inheritance law, gender and race, social structure, wealth inequality, domestic violence, and indigenous people’s rights, among others. Recognizing that inheritance law is a society’s DNA, the conference will present theoretical, historical, and practical approaches to ways it has and continues to maintain social structure and ways it can change it.

The deadline for proposals is August 1. Send them to cspivack[@]okcu.edu

I'm very much looking forward to returning to Oklahoma for the conference and to hearing the latest on how issues of race, class, and gender are important to trusts and estates pedagogy, practice, and scholarship.  I'm going to be talking about the trust for slavery and freedom -- that is, how the technology of trusts was used to manage enslaved human beings, to keep them out of the hands of creditors, and on occasion to free them.

The image is Robinson Hall at Washington and Lee University, which was built using money left to Washington College.  It's one of the images in my mind's eye when I think of fortunes left in trust.  I talk a little more about the story of Robinson Hall here.

Comments

[high heels shoes]

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[jimbino]

What about "Wills, Trusts and Estates meets marital status." Singles of all genders, races and classes are far more disadvantaged than are those of a particular gender, class or race.

[Alfred Brophy]

Marital status is an important part of this discussion, obviously. Single testators often have patterns of distribution that are rather different from married/widowed people. Just to be clear, the discussion will not just be about disadvantage. To take one example, part of what people will talk about, I'd expect, is about estate planning for non-traditional families.

Whether single people are disadvantaged is less clear to me. Are you thinking single people are disadvantaged as testators? How so? Or are you thinking that single people are disadvantaged as beneficiaries? You think they receive small distributions than if they are part of a family? That's surely true in some cases.

In the work I've done on 19th century wills, devises to single women are all over the map -- sometimes they're given additional property in trust to provide for their care until they marry. At other times devises provide only an estate for "widowhood" -- that is, until a widow remarries or dies.

This raises some really interesting issues about how often testators have equal vs. favored distributions of property to issue. I'm really interested in how those patterns change over time and why. There's a lot of work that's been done on this in the 18th century British speaking Americas. Less on the 19th century.