The Virginia Uniform Trust Code

In its 2005 Session, the Virginia General Assembly enacted Senate Bill 891,1 thus adopting the Uniform Trust Code ( UTC ), with modifications considered appropriate to this state\u27s institutions, traditions, and jurisprudence. The Virginia Uniform Trust Code ( Virginia UTC ), set forth in new Chapter 31 of Title 55 of the Virginia Code, has an effective date of July 1, 2006, but, once in effect, it will be applicable (with some exceptions) to trusts created before, on, or after that date. The new Virginia UTC, which encompasses the great bulk of the principles and rules that comprise the law of trusts in Virginia, has great relevance and importance to lawyers who specialize in estate planning and to lawyers who represent trustees or trust beneficiaries. It also affects lawyers whose clients, as thirdparties, have transactional relationships with trustees. The legislation will also affect institutional fiduciaries, accountants, and other non-lawyer professionals whose activities involve administering trusts or advising settlors, trustees, and trust beneficiaries. This article is directed to all of those audiences, with the goal of informing them about the principal features of the legislation and its implications for their practices. In doing so, the article will identify most of the relatively small number of differences between the Virginia UTC and the official text of the UTC as adopted by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws ( NCCUSL )

A Direct Detection of Gas Accretion: The Lyman Limit System in 3C 232

The gas added and removed from galaxies over cosmic time greatly affects their stellar populations and star formation rates. QSO absorption studies in close QSO/galaxy pairs create a unique opportunity to study the physical conditions and kinematics of this gas. Here we present new Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images of the QSO/galaxy pair 3C 232/NGC 3067. The quasar spectrum contains a Lyman-limit absorption system (LLS) due to NGC 3067 at cz = 1421 km/s that is associated with the nearby SAB galaxy NGC 3067. Previous work identifies this absorber as a high-velocity cloud (HVC) in NGC 3067 but the kinematics of the absorbing gas, infalling or outflowing, were uncertain. The HST images presented here establish the orientation of NGC 3067 and so establish that the LLS/HVC is infalling. Using this system as a prototype, we extend these results to higher-z Mg II/LLS to suggest that Mg II/LLSs are a sight line sampling of the so-called "cold mode accretion" (CMA) infalling onto luminous galaxies. But to match the observed Mg II absorber statistics, the CMA must be more highly ionized at higher redshifts. The key observations needed to further the study of low-z LLSs is HST/UV spectroscopy, for which a new instrument, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, has just been installed greatly enhancing our observational capabilities.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, accepted by PAS