Ann F. Baum Memorial Elder Law Lecture Featuring Professor Robert H. Sitkoff

Robert H. Sitkoff delivered the spring 2015 Ann F. Baum Memorial Elder Law Lecture.  "Revocable Trusts and Incapacity Planning: More than Just a Will Substitute" The use of trusts has evolved from means of transferring property to mechanisms for managing assets and operating businesses and more recently, to will substitutes for avoiding probate and simplifying post-death transfers. Elder Law practitioners, meanwhile, have increasingly used revocable trusts in planning for possible incapacity to avoid the costs and publicity associated with custodianship and guardianship. But various state-level reforms of trust law to accommodate older uses of these devices have not always been salutary to this newer use of trusts and often locked the revocable trust into a pure will-substitute model. This lecture will examine these reforms in the context of trusts as guardianship substitutes and suggest that the law of trusts requires further reform.  An expert in wills, trusts, estates, and fiduciary administration, Robert H. Sitkoff is the John L. Gray Professor of Law at Harvard University.