Federalizing Principles of Donative Intent and Unanticipated Circumstances

This Comment identifies a central tenet of wealth transfer law that should guide federal actors when operating in this area: Wealth transfer law facilitates donative intent by responding to circumstances unanticipated by the donor. Wealth transfer law performs this intent- fulfilling function by supplying opt-outs, presumptions, and default rules to solve problems created by the donor\u27s inability to predict or respond to future events. To illustrate that principle, this Comment will focus on one such rule, disclaimer rights, which refer to a donee\u27s refusal to accept a donative transfer. In Disclaimers and Federalism, Professor Adam J. Hirsch identifies several settings in which federal law improperly displaces or applies state law disclaimer rights. This Comment argues that many of the conflicts identified by Professor Hirsch could be transparently and fairly evaluated by considering principles of donative intent and unanticipated circumstances

Social Security Representative Payee Misuse

This Article examines the problem of benefit misuse within the Social Security representative payee system, identifies shortcomings in the current legal framework for policing the payee\u27s conduct, and proposes legislative reform. The Social Security representative payee system serves an important function by protecting beneficiaries who have cognitive impairments and therefore cannot manage their own financial affairs. For beneficiaries living in an institutional setting, such as a nursing or group home, however, the appointment of the home or home administrator as representative payee creates conflicts of interest that adversely affect the beneficiary. Benefit misuse by representative payees in this setting tends to go undetected because the Social Security Administration lacks resources to perform universal audits and the cognitively compromised beneficiary is often incapable of detecting financial improprieties. To improve oversight of institutional representative payees such as nursing and group homes, this Article proposes that Congress create a family representative program wherein a concerned relative or friend would be authorized to monitor the payee without assuming the burdens and liabilities of a representative payee appointment. The family representative would be a person familiar with the beneficiary\u27s needs and circumstances and would receive a copy of all reports submitted by the representative payee to the Social Security Administration. The family representative\u27s access to information regarding the payee\u27s performance would facilitate greater detection and reporting of benefit misuse to the Social Security Administration than under the current system. The Article\u27s Appendix contains legislative language for a proposed statutory amendment to the Social Security Act that would implement the family representative program

The New Undue Influence

The doctrine of undue influence has long been the problem child of inheritance law. Undue influence, a hazy combination of fraud and duress, supposedly invalidates bequests that a beneficiary obtained by overriding the volition of a vulnerable testator or settlor. But because relationships are complex, concepts like free will are slippery, and challenges to do native transfers are litigated after the owner dies, courts struggle to apply the rule. Making matters worse, fact finders exploit the principle’s vagueness to protect a decedent’s family at the expense of non-traditional relationships. As a result, scholars have criticized undue influence fordecades, with some even calling for its abolition. Yet this Article examines a little-noticed trend that is cutting in the opposite direction. Responding to the epidemic of elder abuse, several jurisdictions have started to experiment with a supercharged version ofthe undue influence doctrine. These states have realized that because the cost of pursuing undue influence allegations often dwarfs the contestant’ spotential recovery, the traditional rule does not do enough to deterpernicious misconduct. Thus, as Congress often creates bounties to encourage plaintiffs to enforce statutes, these lawmakers have incentivized“ probate attorneys general” to file undue influence claims. They have done so by recognizing novel presumptions of undue influence, a civilclaim for undue influence as a form of elder abuse, and enhanced remediesfor undue influence committed in bad faith. We call these updates of theancient rule the “new undue influence.” The Article then offers a ground-level assessment of this phenomenonby analyzing a dataset of nearly 7,000 recent probate and trust cases from California, which has been a pioneer in the new undue influence movement. The Article reaches three main conclusions. First, policymakers have successfully changed the economics of undue influence litigation. Indeed, the Article finds that heirs and beneficiaries who invokethe new undue influence achieve a higher “success rate”—the amount of damages or settlement proceeds divided by the maximum possible recovery—than those who only seek relief under traditional law. Second,contrary to scholars’ assumptions, judges and juries no longer seem to manipulate the undue influence doctrine to protect a decedent’s family. Infact, there appears to be no meaningful link between case results and theparties’ relationship to the testator or settlor. Third, permitting contestants to repackage probate cases as civil claims for elder abuse creates anomalies. Challengers often file probate petitions and civil complaints, opening the door for duplicative litigation, doctrinal inconsistency, and procedural gamesmanship. The Article therefore suggests ways for courts and policymakers to harness the benefits of the new undue influence while minimizing these cost

A New Framework for Condominium Structural Safety Reforms

Forty years after the widespread popularization of residential condominium ownership in the United States, millions of Americans now live in aging, densely occupied structures that are subject to little (if any) ongoing regulation of structural safety. Most structural safety requirements are imposed and enforced at the time of initial construction, thus relegating questions of how to maintain a building’s structural integrity to individual owners and the mechanisms of condominium governance. However, reliance on voluntary action by unit owners too often falters because the divided ownership characteristic of the condominium form deters associations from investing in preventive maintenance. Postponement of critical repairs is especially likely when structural safety risks are neither visibly apparent nor easily understood without structural engineering expertise. But tragically, the failure to address structural deterioration can be a deadly mistake, as demonstrated by the 2021 collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida. This Article tackles the problem of structural deterioration in the large and growing stock of aging residential condominiums. It argues that building codes should be reformed to mandate periodic structural safety certifications, while also recognizing that regulation alone may be insufficient to ensure completion of expensive structural repairs when individual owners are unwilling or unable to pay for them. After explaining how property law’s prioritization of liens impedes condominium associations from developing innovative strategies for financing critical structural repairs, the Article proposes reforms that would incentivize the development of a debt market to enable associations to finance those repairs while allowing cash-strapped owners to remain in their homes

The Commodification of Public Land Records

The United States deed recording system alters the “first in time, first in right” doctrine to enable good faith purchasers to record their deeds to protect themselves against prior unrecorded conveyances and to provide constructive notice of their interests to potential subsequent purchasers. Constructive notice, however, works only when land records are available for public inspection, a practice that had long proved uncontroversial. For centuries, deed archives were almost exclusively patronized by land-transacting parties because the difficulty and cost of title examination deterred nearly everyone else. The modern information economy, however, propelled this staid corner of property law into a computer age in which land records are electronically maintained and instantaneously accessible over the internet. That development transformed public land records into a marketable commodity independent of the deed recording system’s notice-giving function. In response to booming demand for big data, content extracted from public land records (name, home address, marital status, among other personal information) is now actively traded on the internet and routinely purchased by commercial firms for targeted marketing and customer prospecting. Data from public land records are now more accessible than ever before, representing a win for transparency, but, as tragically illustrated by the recent high-profile attack against a federal judge, an erosion of privacy that can dangerously equip wrongdoers with on-demand entrée to personal information. This Article provides the first scholarly account of the deed recording system’s transformation from a notice-giving mechanism of property law to a primary supplier of commodified data for sale in the modern information economy. The Article surveys the traditional functions of deed recording, describes the recent migration of deeds from paper to electronic form as the predicate for commodification, and considers the implications of electronic disclosure for privacy, transparency, and the regulation of anonymous entity ownership. The Article concludes by appraising the efficacy of recent privacy reforms under consideration by Congress and state legislatures, and by outlining voluntary precautions that homeowners can implement under existing law

Social Security Representative Payee Misuse

This Article examines the problem of benefit misuse within the Social Security representative payee system, identifies shortcomings in the current legal framework for policing the payee\u27s conduct, and proposes legislative reform. The Social Security representative payee system serves an important function by protecting beneficiaries who have cognitive impairments and therefore cannot manage their own financial affairs. For beneficiaries living in an institutional setting, such as a nursing or group home, however, the appointment of the home or home administrator as representative payee creates conflicts of interest that adversely affect the beneficiary. Benefit misuse by representative payees in this setting tends to go undetected because the Social Security Administration lacks resources to perform universal audits and the cognitively compromised beneficiary is often incapable of detecting financial improprieties. To improve oversight of institutional representative payees such as nursing and group homes, this Article proposes that Congress create a family representative program wherein a concerned relative or friend would be authorized to monitor the payee without assuming the burdens and liabilities of a representative payee appointment. The family representative would be a person familiar with the beneficiary\u27s needs and circumstances and would receive a copy of all reports submitted by the representative payee to the Social Security Administration. The family representative\u27s access to information regarding the payee\u27s performance would facilitate greater detection and reporting of benefit misuse to the Social Security Administration than under the current system. The Article\u27s Appendix contains legislative language for a proposed statutory amendment to the Social Security Act that would implement the family representative program

The New Undue Influence

The doctrine of undue influence has long been the problem child of inheritance law. Undue influence, a hazy combination of fraud and duress, supposedly invalidates bequests that a beneficiary obtained by overriding the volition of a vulnerable testator or settlor. But because relationships are complex, concepts like free will are slippery, and challenges to do native transfers are litigated after the owner dies, courts struggle to apply the rule. Making matters worse, fact finders exploit the principle’s vagueness to protect a decedent’s family at the expense of non-traditional relationships. As a result, scholars have criticized undue influence fordecades, with some even calling for its abolition. Yet this Article examines a little-noticed trend that is cutting in the opposite direction. Responding to the epidemic of elder abuse, several jurisdictions have started to experiment with a supercharged version ofthe undue influence doctrine. These states have realized that because the cost of pursuing undue influence allegations often dwarfs the contestant’ spotential recovery, the traditional rule does not do enough to deterpernicious misconduct. Thus, as Congress often creates bounties to encourage plaintiffs to enforce statutes, these lawmakers have incentivized“ probate attorneys general” to file undue influence claims. They have done so by recognizing novel presumptions of undue influence, a civilclaim for undue influence as a form of elder abuse, and enhanced remediesfor undue influence committed in bad faith. We call these updates of theancient rule the “new undue influence.” The Article then offers a ground-level assessment of this phenomenonby analyzing a dataset of nearly 7,000 recent probate and trust cases from California, which has been a pioneer in the new undue influence movement. The Article reaches three main conclusions. First, policymakers have successfully changed the economics of undue influence litigation. Indeed, the Article finds that heirs and beneficiaries who invokethe new undue influence achieve a higher “success rate”—the amount of damages or settlement proceeds divided by the maximum possible recovery—than those who only seek relief under traditional law. Second,contrary to scholars’ assumptions, judges and juries no longer seem to manipulate the undue influence doctrine to protect a decedent’s family. Infact, there appears to be no meaningful link between case results and theparties’ relationship to the testator or settlor. Third, permitting contestants to repackage probate cases as civil claims for elder abuse creates anomalies. Challengers often file probate petitions and civil complaints, opening the door for duplicative litigation, doctrinal inconsistency, and procedural gamesmanship. The Article therefore suggests ways for courts and policymakers to harness the benefits of the new undue influence while minimizing these cost

A Hierarchical Bayesian Language Model based on Pitman-Yor Processes

We propose a new hierarchical Bayesian n-gram model of natural languages. Our model makes use of a generalization of the commonly used Dirichlet distributions called Pitman-Yor processes which produce power-law distributions more closely resembling those in natural languages. We show that an approximation to the hierarchical Pitman-Yor language model recovers the exact formulation of interpolated Kneser-Ney, one of the best smoothing methods for n-gram language models. Experiments verify that our model gives cross entropy results superior to interpolated Kneser-Ney and comparable to modified Kneser-Ney. © 2006 Association for Computational Linguistics

The Commodification of Public Land Records

The United States deed recording system alters the “first in time, first in right” doctrine to enable good faith purchasers to record their deeds to protect themselves against prior unrecorded conveyances and to provide constructive notice of their interests to potential subsequent purchasers. Constructive notice, however, works only when land records are available for public inspection, a practice that had long proved uncontroversial. For centuries, deed archives were almost exclusively patronized by land-transacting parties because the difficulty and cost of title examination deterred nearly everyone else. The modern information economy, however, propelled this staid corner of property law into a computer age in which land records are electronically maintained and instantaneously accessible over the internet. That development transformed public land records into a marketable commodity independent of the deed recording system’s notice-giving function. In response to booming demand for big data, content extracted from public land records (name, home address, marital status, among other personal information) is now actively traded on the internet and routinely purchased by commercial firms for targeted marketing and customer prospecting. Data from public land records are now more accessible than ever before, representing a win for transparency, but, as tragically illustrated by the recent high-profile attack against a federal judge, an erosion of privacy that can dangerously equip wrongdoers with on-demand entrée to personal information. This Article provides the first scholarly account of the deed recording system’s transformation from a notice-giving mechanism of property law to a primary supplier of commodified data for sale in the modern information economy. The Article surveys the traditional functions of deed recording, describes the recent migration of deeds from paper to electronic form as the predicate for commodification, and considers the implications of electronic disclosure for privacy, transparency, and the regulation of anonymous entity ownership. The Article concludes by appraising the efficacy of recent privacy reforms under consideration by Congress and state legislatures, and by outlining voluntary precautions that homeowners can implement under existing law

A New Framework for Condominium Structural Safety Reforms

Forty years after the widespread popularization of residential condominium ownership in the United States, millions of Americans now live in aging, densely occupied structures that are subject to little (if any) ongoing regulation of structural safety. Most structural safety requirements are imposed and enforced at the time of initial construction, thus relegating questions of how to maintain a building’s structural integrity to individual owners and the mechanisms of condominium governance. However, reliance on voluntary action by unit owners too often falters because the divided ownership characteristic of the condominium form deters associations from investing in preventive maintenance. Postponement of critical repairs is especially likely when structural safety risks are neither visibly apparent nor easily understood without structural engineering expertise. But tragically, the failure to address structural deterioration can be a deadly mistake, as demonstrated by the 2021 collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida. This Article tackles the problem of structural deterioration in the large and growing stock of aging residential condominiums. It argues that building codes should be reformed to mandate periodic structural safety certifications, while also recognizing that regulation alone may be insufficient to ensure completion of expensive structural repairs when individual owners are unwilling or unable to pay for them. After explaining how property law’s prioritization of liens impedes condominium associations from developing innovative strategies for financing critical structural repairs, the Article proposes reforms that would incentivize the development of a debt market to enable associations to finance those repairs while allowing cash-strapped owners to remain in their homes