The income gap between women and men has gotten plenty of attention in the last few decades: today women earn seventy-nine cents for every dollar med earn. But few people are aware of the much more serious gap: for every dollar in wealth men own, women own thirty-two cents. Wealth is what gives us a financial safety net when we lose our jobs, break up a relationship, become sick, or get hit by some other financial crisis. It enables us to build security, to give our children a future, and to retire. Wealth can generate income, whether through investments in the financial markets, or real estate, or through funding a startup business. Significant wealth even allows us to influence our world by allowing contributions to political campaigns or policy initiatives. The Savvy Women’s Guide to Property Law lays the blame for the gender wealth gap where it belongs—on the legal system—and helps women avoid the pitfalls that deprive them of their rightful share. Property laws disadvantage women at key stages of life. While treating men and women equally on its face, these laws play out in a discriminatory fashion because men and women are often not equal when it comes to income, career opportunities, and caregiving. Spivack explains how the legal system disadvantages women who are going through six difficult life events in which the distribution of wealth and property comes into play: Breaking up with someone they’ve cohabited with Negotiating prenuptial agreements Going through a divorce Surviving domestic and financial abuse Caring for an elderly or sick family member Outliving their spouse and inheriting part of their estate

CasebookPlus Hardbound - New, hardbound print book includes lifetime digital access to an eBook, with the ability to highlight and take notes, and 12-month access to a digital Learning Library that includes self-assessment quizzes tied to this book, leading study aids, an outline starter, and Gilbert Law Dictionary. This textbook takes a learner-centered and experiential approach to trusts and estates law, which makes it well suited to teaching both online and face-to-face. 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. The second edition continues to feature some of the most teachable trusts and estates cases, to focus on issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality, and to offer online student resources. New features of this edition include learning outcomes at the beginning of each chapter to help with ABA compliance and student focus, a broad and varied array of formative assessments, a glossary of terms, highlight boxes containing practice notes, connection notes, and language notes, and final chapter take-aways to link topics together. Some examples of assessments 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, extensive notes designed to help lead students through the major issues, and an appendix of sample documents.

For women and other marginalized groups, the reality is that the laws regulating estates and trusts may not be treating them fairly. By using popular feminist legal theories as well as their own definitions of feminism, the authors of this volume present rewritten opinions from well-known estates and trust cases. Covering eleven important cases, this collection reflects the diversity in society and explores the need for greater diversity in the law. By re-examining these cases, the contributors are able to demonstrate how women's property rights, as well as the rights of other marginalized groups, have been limited by the law.

xv, 266 pp. Using fiction as a lens through which to view particular developments in the law, each of the essays in this book discusses a work of literary fiction - some classical (the tale of Ruth in the Bible, the fiction of Franz Kafka and Herman Melville, the plays of William Shakespeare), some modern (the post-September 11 fiction of William Gibson, Ken Kalfus, Claire Messud, Ian McEwan and Helen Schulman) - that concerns, directly or indirectly, the historical development of the law. This exploration of legal history through fiction pays particular attention to its relevance to our present circumstances and our growing concerns about terrorism and civil liberties.
Each essay considers the legal lessons about the fictional event or events at its core, lessons that tell us something worth remembering as we continue to chart law's evolution. These lessons, like those that may be found in all great literature, necessarily extend beyond the historical confines of the characters and plot and background of each story to embrace the modern condition - which, as these great stories suggest, is and always has been the only condition.
"These provocative, scholarly essays range from the Bible to a look at how tomorrow's technology may influence fundamental social organization with many startling stops in between - Lady Macbeth, Kafka, Napster and post 9/11 fiction to name a few. Friedman's choices help the reader view the transit of law and culture through novel, sometimes unforgettable, dimensions."
-- Michael Meltsner, Matthews Distinguished University Professor, Northeastern Law School and author of The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer.
"The stories examined here brilliantly reflect worlds imagined by literature that speak to the modern condition: worlds steeped in law, worlds where law is refracted through complex orderings, and worlds where law seems virtually absent. All eloquently express the power of law to shape and unshape our realities within the modern condition.
The authors examine the law's role within a wide range of literary and historical texts. This volume remembers our deeply missed colleague George Dargo, and builds on his prolific examination of law in the context of biblical texts and the works of Herman Melville and Franz Kafka. Three of his elegantly written articles are included here. Lawrence Friedman's intricately researched essays reveal continuities, within the legal imaginary, between the novel at the height of its power in the nineteenth century and cutting-edge postmodern fiction in the post-9/11 world. Carla Spivack rounds out the volume with essays that take a fresh look at property rights and law, not normally viewed as the most scintillating of subjects. She engages in a fascinating exegesis of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and in her other articles provides bold insights from feminist, gender and queer studies. "
-- Tawia B. Ansah, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Professor of Law, FIU, College of Law.
LAWRENCE FRIEDMAN received his bachelor of arts in history from Connecticut College and holds law degrees from Boston College Law School and Harvard Law School. A member of the faculty at New England Law - Boston, he has written widely in the areas of constitutional law, national security law, and law and literature. His previous books include The Massachusetts State Constitution (with Lynnea Thody) and The Case for Congress: Separation of Powers and the War on Terror (with Victor Hansen).

The Trusts & Estates book in the Developing Professional Skills series facilitates the incorporation of a wide range of practical legal skills into the trusts and estates classroom to promote student learning. Each assignment draws upon key doctrinal concepts, such as donative freedom, intestacy, will execution and revocation, construction, trust creation & revocation, fiduciary duties, prenuptial agreements, will substitutes, charitable giving, and guardianship. It also seeks to give students a footing in some of the more basic tasks an estate planning attorney would perform, such as explaining succession law to non-lawyers, planning to avoid will contests, locating intestate heirs, etc. Students have the opportunity to develop and refine the following skills in the context of estate planning: Composing legal letters and professional emails Writing court petitions, interrogatories, and charitable gift agreements Developing counseling plans and best practices guidance Conducting a negotiation Engaging in client counseling Creating community presentations Secondarily, this book also incorporates social issues that are inherent in the study and practice of estate planning. These issues revolve around the role of estate planning and succession law in perpetuating wealth inequality. Many of the assignments touch upon these issues; it is of course up to the professor how much to draw them out and emphasize them. Each assignment is complete and effective even without emphasis on these issues. However, they add a worthwhile dimension to the book.

For women and other marginalized groups, the reality is that the laws regulating estates and trusts may not be treating them fairly. By using popular feminist legal theories as well as their own definitions of feminism, the authors of this volume present rewritten opinions from well-known estates and trust cases. Covering eleven important cases, this collection reflects the diversity in society and explores the need for greater diversity in the law. By re-examining these cases, the contributors are able to demonstrate how women's property rights, as well as the rights of other marginalized groups, have been limited by the law.