Experiencing Trusts and Estates — Third Edition

Deborah S. Gordon | Karen J. Sneddon | Carla Spivack | Allison Anna Tait

Here is the publisher’s description of this updated casebook:

This textbook uniquely combines rigorous doctrinal instruction, learner-centered and practice-oriented material, and reminders of the social and political consequences of how we structure inheritance law. The opening chapters introduce students to key concepts in intergenerational wealth transfer and planning for incapacity and death. The remainder of the book highlights inheritance law concepts from both a forward-looking (planning/drafting) and backward-looking (litigation) perspective. It is the only trusts and estates textbook to include the Indian Trust cases in the fiduciary duties section and to place older undue influence cases like Moses and Kaufmann in the context of social norms and biases. The third edition continues to include learning outcomes at the beginning of each chapter to help with ABA compliance and student focus, a broad, varied, and updated array of formative assessments (with new sample answers and rubrics), a glossary of terms (expanded), highlight boxes to draw student attention to practice notes, connection notes, and language notes, and final chapter assessments to link topics together. Some examples of the assessments in the third edition include role playing exercises, drafting client letters and testamentary instruments, writing policy papers, legislation, and judicial opinions, and preparing community and client presentations. Each chapter also features more traditional hypotheticals, fact patterns, and discussion questions. The third edition also provides a bank of assessment questions and answers (multiple choice, short essay, longer essay, drafting, and integrated) designed to prepare students for the NextGen bar exam.