“Resolved: The Trust is Dead” — Call for Participation

“Resolved: The Trust is Dead”
Call for Participation
AALS Section on Trusts & Estates
2011 AALS Annual Meeting
January 5-8, 2011
San Francisco, California

The AALS Section on Trusts & Estates will hold a debate-based program during the AALS 2011 Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California, with four expected debaters.  Two will be chosen through this open call for participation. Two will be invited by the Section’s Executive Board and likely will include a nationally-recognized practitioner and a state legislator or judge.  The debate will proceed in four parts: a moderated debate, a town-hall question-and-answer session, closing remarks and an interactive audience evaluation.  Preliminary rules of debate are available on the Section’s webpage here: https://connect.aals.org.

Any full-time faculty member of an AALS member or fee-paid law school may respond to this call for participation with a short (not to exceed 500 words) written statement of his or her intended substantive remarks as a debate participant.  Submissions may be in the form of a short essay or bulleted debate points.  Foreign, visiting (and not full-time on a different faculty) and adjunct faculty members, graduate students, and fellows are not eligible for consideration. 

A potential debater’s written submission should respond in some way to the resolution: “The Trust is Dead.”  Some of the topics which might be explored to resolve the question of whether or not the trust is dead include:

• Do demands for changes in the law — to allow directed trusts and purpose trusts, for example, or to make rules governing the conduct of fiduciaries default ones only — mean that the trust, as traditionally understood, is changing (or has changed) beyond recognition? 
• What conditions have contributed most significantly to recent changes in trust law?  Are market mechanisms and political considerations at work, or have American attitudes towards inherited wealth changed dramatically, so that dynastic wealth is viewed as acceptable or even desirable?
• Have the uniform law projects of the last twenty years or so (and the new Restatements closely associated with them) responded effectively to changes in trust law and to pressures for further change? Will these projects guide the development of the trust for the foreseeable future or are these projects already “outrun” by current practices?

This is a debate with a minor publication opportunity.  Written submissions should not be taken directly from a work that is or will be committed for publication prior to the Annual Meeting. Each professor may submit only once for consideration.

Submissions will be reviewed anonymously by members of the Section’s Executive Board. The written statement should be accompanied by a cover letter with the author’s name and contact information. The manuscript itself, including title page and footnotes (if any), must not contain any references that identify the author or the author’s school. The submitting author is responsible for taking any steps necessary to redact self-identifying references.

Written remarks or other proceedings of the program will be published in the ACTEC Journal (housed at Hofstra Law School), subject to approval by the journal’s editors.

To be considered, submissions should be sent electronically to Professor Bridget Crawford, Pace Law School, bcrawford@law.pace.edu. The deadline for submission is Tuesday, May 11, 2010 at 5:00 p.m. (Eastern).  Selected professors will be notified by May 25, 2010.  All faculty members will be responsible for paying their annual meeting registration fee and travel expenses.

Any inquiries about the Call for Participation should be submitted to:

Bridget J. Crawford
Pace University School of Law
(914) 422-4416
bcrawford@law.pace.edu