In law, a trust is a relationship in which the holder of property gives it to another person or entity who must keep and use it solely for the benefit of another person or group of persons who are termed as 'beneficiary'. In the English common law tradition, the party who entrusts the property is known as the "settlor", the party to whom the property is entrusted is known as the "trustee", the party for whose benefit the property is entrusted is known as the "beneficiary", and the entrusted property itself is known as the "corpus" or "trust property". A testamentary trust is created by a will and arises after the death of the settlor. An inter vivos trust is created during the settlor's lifetime by a trust instrument. A trust may be revocable or irrevocable; an irrevocable trust can be "broken" (revoked) by a judicial proceeding or by consent of the settlor and the beneficiaries.
Harvard Law School (HLS) is the law school of Harvard University, a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1817, Harvard Law School is the oldest continuously operating law school in the United States. Harvard Law School's history of innovation in legal education and its alumni network have made it one of the most prestigious law schools in the world.
The Harvard Law Review is a law review published by an independent student group at Harvard Law School. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the Harvard Law Review's 2015 impact factor of 4.979 placed the journal first out of 143 journals in the category "Law". It is published monthly from November through June, with the November issue dedicated to covering the previous year's term of the Supreme Court of the United States. The journal also publishes the online-only Harvard Law Review Forum, a rolling journal of scholarly responses to the main journal's content. The law review is one of three honors societies at the law school, along with the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau and the Board of Student Advisors. Students who are selected for more than one of these three organizations may only join one.
A financial endowment is a legal structure for managing, and in many cases indefinitely perpetuating, a pool of financial, real estate, or other investments for a specific purpose according to the will of its founders and donors. Endowments are often structured so that the inflation-adjusted principal or "corpus" value is kept intact, while a portion of the fund can be spent each year, utilizing a prudent spending policy.
In American jurisprudence, the Restatements of the Law are a set of treatises on legal subjects that seek to inform judges and lawyers about general principles of common law. There are now four series of Restatements, all published by the American Law Institute, an organization of judges, legal academics, and practitioners founded in 1923.
Jesse Dukeminier was a professor of law for 40 years at the University of California, Los Angeles, and authored or co-authored a significant number of articles and textbooks in the areas of property law, wills, trusts, and estates. Dukeminier's Trusts and Estates textbook has been described as "widely used and nationally recognized". Updates are still being produced to the text, with the Dukeminier name, alongside coauthors, remaining on the work.
William M. Landes is an American economist who has written about the economic analysis of law and an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which cited him for his work in the field. He is among the most cited law professors in American law reviews. Landes also is the original founder of Lexecon, a legal and economic consulting firm.
John Harriss Langbein is an American legal scholar who serves as the Sterling Professor emeritus of Law and Legal History at Yale University. He is an expert in the fields of trusts and estates, comparative law, and Anglo-American legal history.
Lance Liebman is an American law professor. He is the former Dean of Columbia Law School, and served as the Director of the American Law Institute from May 1999 to May 2014.
Arthur Linton Corbin was an American lawyer and legal scholar who was a professor at Yale Law School. He contributed to the development of the philosophy of law known as legal realism, and he wrote one of the most celebrated legal treatises of the 20th century, Corbin on Contracts.
Harold Joseph Berman was an American legal scholar who was an expert in comparative, international and Soviet/Russian law as well as legal history, philosophy of law and the intersection of law and religion. He was a law professor at Harvard Law School and Emory University School of Law for more than sixty years, and held the James Barr Ames Professorship of Law at Harvard before he was appointed as the first Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory. He has been described as "one of the great polymaths of American legal education."
A dynasty trust is a trust designed to avoid or minimize estate taxes being applied to family wealth with each subsequent generation. By holding assets in trust and making well-defined distributions to beneficiaries at each generation, the assets of the trust are not subject to estate, gift or generation-skipping transfer tax (GST) taxes. Moreover, the wealth can be exempt from GST tax) if properly set up.
John Anthony Edwards Pottow is the John Philip Dawson Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, specializing in international commercial law, bankruptcy and consumer finance. In addition to scholarship, Pottow is known for pro bono work and has argued pro bono cases before the United States Supreme Court and several United States Courts of Appeals, winning an award for pro bono service. His public service in international trade law includes service on the United States Delegation to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) and the State Department's Advisory Committee on Private International Law.
Ira Mark Bloom is an American law professor, legal scholar, and the Justice David Josiah Brewer Distinguished Professor of Law at Albany Law School.
Jill R. Horwitz is Vice Dean of Faculty and Intellectual Life and David Sanders Professor of Law and Medicine at the UCLA School of Law and Associate Director of the Center for Law and Economics at UCLA. Horwitz is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Reporter at the American Law Institute, Adjunct Professor of Economics at the University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia of Canada, and a member of the Board of Advisors of the New York University National Center on Philanthropy and the Law.
William Viscusi is an American economist whose primary fields of research are the economics of risk and uncertainty, risk and environmental regulation, behavioral economics, and law and economics. Viscusi is the University Distinguished Professor of Law, Economics, and Management at Vanderbilt Law School where he and his wife, Joni Hersch, are the founders and co-directors of the Ph.D. Program in Law and Economics. Prior to his appointment at Vanderbilt, Viscusi was the first John F. Cogan, Jr. Professor of Law and Economics at Harvard Law School and Director of the Harvard Program on Empirical Legal Studies. Viscusi is the author of Pricing Lives: Guideposts for a Safer Society.
Robert Harris Mnookin is an American lawyer, author, and the Samuel Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He focuses largely on dispute resolution, negotiation, and arbitration and was one of the primary co-arbitrators that resolved a 7-year software rights dispute between IBM and Fujitsu in the 1980s. Mnookin has been the Chair of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School since 1994.
Max M. Schanzenbach is the Seigle Family Professor of Law at the Northwestern University School of Law.
Christopher Tarver Robertson is a specialist in health law working at the intersection of law, philosophy and science. His research explores how the law affects decision making in domains of scientific uncertainty and misaligned incentives, which he calls "institutional epistemology." Robertson is professor, N. Neal Pike Scholar, and Associate Dean at Boston University. He is affiliated faculty with the Petrie Flom Center for Health Care Policy, Bioethics and Biotechnology at Harvard Law School. His work includes tort law, bioethics, the First Amendment, and corruption in healthcare and politics. His legal practice has focused on complex litigation involving medical and scientific disputes.
Melanie B. Leslie is the 7th Dean of Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Appointed on July 1, 2015, Leslie is the first Cardozo graduate and the first woman to hold the position. Leslie is the Dr. Samuel Belkin Professor of Law and has been a member of the Cardozo faculty since 1996, teaching Property, Trust and Estates, Nonprofit Governance and Evidence. Her areas of research include trusts and estates law. During her tenure, Leslie provided oversight for the creation of several programs at Cardozo, including the FAME Center for fashion, art, media and entertainment law, the Center for Rights and Justice, and the Center for Real Estate Law & Policy.
