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Wills, Trusts, and Estates, Twelfth Edition

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Authors
  • Robert H. Sitkoff
  • Jesse Dukeminier
Series / Aspen Casebook Series
BOOKMARK
Book length
1088 pages
Publication Date
2025-11-03
Edition
Twelfth Edition
Description
Table of contents
Preface

Buy a new version of this textbook and receive access to the Connected eBook with Study Center on Casebook Connect, including academic lifetime access to the online ebook with highlight, annotation, and search capabilities. Access also includes practice questions, an outline tool, and other helpful resources. Connected eBooks provide what you need most to be successful in your law school classes.



Widely hailed as one of the best casebooks in legal education, this comprehensive text combines interesting cases, thoughtful analysis, notes, images, and a clear organization for an excellent teaching tool. Cartoons, illustrations, case documents, and photographs provide useful visual commentary. Sidebars on relevant persons, places, and things provide interesting and sometimes humorous context. A comprehensive Teacher’s Manual provides a complete teaching summary of all materials in the book, and comprehensive PowerPoint slides provide helpful structure for classroom organization. 

New to the Twelfth Edition: 

  • Updated treatment of electronic or digital wills, with:
    • a completely revised section on video wills to reflect new case law developments, and
    • attention to law reform to facilitate electronic versions of other estate planning documents
  • Updated and extensively revised coverage of revocable trusts, with attention to new case law developments, especially in the revocation of such a trust
  • Updated and extensively revised treatment of lapse and conditions of survivorship to reflect new case law developments
  • Updated and extensively revised coverage of the principal and income problem, in particular concerning new case law on the power to adjust
  • Attention across topics to ongoing law reform efforts on conflicts of laws in trusts and estates

  • Updated coverage of wealth and income inequality and continuing proposals for a wealth tax

Professors and students will benefit from: 

  • Unique blend of wit, erudition, insight, and playfulness retained from the late Jesse Dukeminier
  • Organization that covers all the key topics in a logical, clear format, including a completely revised section on video wills and attention to reform to facilitate electronic versions of estate planning
  • A visually arresting two-color design
  • Interesting cases that are not only fun to read, but fun to teach
  • Cases enhanced and connected to broader legal principles by well-written notes, questions, problems, and sidebars
  • Cartoons, illustrations, wills and other case documents, and photographs that provide visual commentary and teaching aids
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Table of Contents

SUMMARY OF CONTENTS


Contents 
List of Illustrations 
Preface 
Acknowledgments 


Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION: FREEDOM OF DISPOSITION 
Chapter 2 INTESTACY: AN ESTATE PLAN BY DEFAULT 
Chapter 3 WILLS: FORMALITIES AND FORMS 
Chapter 4 WILLS: CAPACITY AND CONTESTS 
Chapter 5 WILLS: CONSTRUCTION 
Chapter 6 TRUSTS: CHARACTERISTICS AND CREATION 
Chapter 7 NONPROBATE TRANSFERS AND PLANNING
FOR INCAPACITY 
Chapter 8 LIMITS ON FREEDOM OF DISPOSITION:
PROTECTION OF THE SPOUSE AND CHILDREN 
Chapter 9 TRUSTS: FIDUCIARY ADMINISTRATION 
Chapter 10 TRUSTS: ALIENATION AND MODIFICATION 
Chapter 11 TRUSTS: CHARITABLE PURPOSES, CY PRES,
AND SUPERVISION 
Chapter 12 TRUSTS: POWERS OF APPOINTMENT 
Chapter 13 TRUSTS: CONSTRUCTION AND FUTURE
INTERESTS 
Chapter 14 THE RULE AGAINST PERPETUITIES AND
TRUST DURATION 
Chapter 15 WEALTH TRANSFER TAXATION 


Table of Cases 
Author Index 
Index 

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Preface
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About the authors
Robert H. Sitkoff
Professor
Harvard University

Robert H. Sitkoff is the Austin Wakeman Scott Professor of Law and the John L. Gray Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He was the youngest professor with tenure to receive a chair in the history of the school, and he is the only current member of the faculty to hold two chairs within the law school. He has won several teaching awards. Sitkoff’s research focuses on economic and empirical analysis of trusts, estates, and fiduciary administration. His work has been published in leading scholarly journals such as the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, and the Journal of Law and Economics, and he is a coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Fiduciary Law (2019).

A Uniform Law Commissioner from Massachusetts, Sitkoff is the Chair for the drafting committee for an Act on Conflict of Trust and Estate Laws, is a liaison member of the Joint Editorial Board for Uniform Trust and Estate Acts, and was the Chair for the drafting committee for the Uniform Directed Trust Act (2017). He is also a member of the Council of the American Law Institute. Sitkoff serves as an advisory consultant and expert witness in litigation and regulatory matters involving wills, trusts, estates, and fiduciary administration. He has also led training workshops for trust officers and other professional fiduciaries. Sitkoff edits the Wills, Trusts, and Estates abstracting journal in the Social Science Research Network and is an academic fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel.

Jesse Dukeminier
Late Maxwell Professor of Law
University of California, Los Angeles

Jesse Dukeminier is the late Maxwell Professor of Law at UCLA Law School. A professor of law at UCLA for over 40 years, Jesse Dukeminier was renowned for his contributions to the field of property law. His casebooks on property and wills, trusts, and estates are among the most widely used in the country in their fields. For four decades, Dukeminier was widely respected by students and was honored twice as professor of the year by the UCLA School of Law's graduating classes.

Dukeminier received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Teaching and became the first UCLA Law faculty member to receive a University Distinguished Teaching Award. He also received the School of Law's Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Dukeminier was born in West Point, Mississippi, and studied at Harvard University, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1948. He received his law degree from Yale in 1951 and practiced law with a Wall Street firm. Dukeminier joined UCLA in 1963. He also taught at the University of Kentucky, and he visited at Harvard and the University of Chicago.

Product Information
Edition
Twelfth Edition
Publication date
2025-11-03
Copyright Year
2026
Pages
1088
Connected eBook with Study Center + Hardcover
9798892075107
Connected eBook with Study Center (Digital Only)
9798892075114
LLPOD
9798892075138
Audiobook
9798899631887
eBook + Study Center + Audiobook
9798899632853
Subject
Wills, Trusts, and Estates
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