Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1966

Publication Information

42 Notre Dame Law. 153 (1966).

Abstract

This article proposes and explains a will form for the young and promising, but presently impecunious, Calvin Knox. He is called a "junior executive" by appliance dealers, and his property is called an "estate" by his flatterers. He is really a middle-class, white-collar worker; and what he really has is a nonestate of children and debts.

This article is intended to stimulate argument. Nobody ever argues about Calvin Knox's nonestate. Nobody ever 'discusses' him in public. Practicing lawyers who can afford to write about "estate planning" pay no attention to him. Bar association panels and slick-paper journals leave him to the mutual-fund salesmen. No legal writer has produced a discussion of the nonestate that a teacher can give students with a straight face. (Some teachers grimace and some smile, but none is bland about the situation.)

The reason for the oversight is probably obvious, but is best left unstated. Proposing a will form to practitioners is sufficient arrogance for a law professor. (Academic lawyers full of advice on how to practice law invite the sort of observation E.B. White made about home economists. He said that those he had met had only one thing in common—"none of them was at home.")

Teachers of "estate planning" courses occasionally remember that old generals and captains of ships never ask their men to do anything they would not do themselves. If a teacher asks his students to draft a 'will for Calvin Knox (as this writer has), and if nothing in print is as intelligent as what the students write, it is time to get a little competition into the journals.

Comments

Reprinted with permission of Notre Dame Law Review (previously Notre Dame Lawyer).

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