Article: Uncontested Trusts in Court
CJ Ryan (Indiana University Maurer School of Law), David Horton (University of California, Davis) and Reid K. Weisbord (Rutgers Law School) recently published, Uncontested Trusts in Court, 2025. Provided below is an Abstract:
Supposedly, trusts transmit wealth privately and only require judicial intervention if they spark litigation. However, we assembled a dataset of 1,431 trust filings from a sevenyear period in San Francisco Superior Court and found that 971 (68%) did not involve a dispute. This Article describes why these uncontested trusts ended up in the judicial system. It reveals that the culprits include human error, changed circumstances, and the need to protect vulnerable parties. It also explores the implications of our data for how we think about trusts and ways to keep uncontested trusts out of court.