Private Law Theory

“Reid Kress Weisbord and David Horton published an Article entitled, Boilerplate and Default Rules in Wills Law: An Empirical Analysis, 103 Iowa Law Review 663 (2018). Provided below is an abstract of the Article: ‘The prime directive of wills law is to honor a testator’s intent. As a result, lawmakers take pains to populate the field with majoritarian default rules: those that fill gaps in an estate plan with principles that reflect the wishes of most property owners. However, this Article exposes a phenomenon that undermines these efforts. Using an original, hand-collected dataset of 230 recently probated wills, it demonstrates that testators routinely opt out of majoritarian default rules through provisions that appear to be boilerplate …'” (more)

[Gerry W Beyer, Wills, Trusts and Estates Prof Blog, 7 April]

First posted 2018-04-09 05:58:37