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Property and inheritance are "quintessential state matters."' In fact, there is no federal intestacy law. There is no federal wills law. There is no federal trust law. And yet. Increasingly, federal law impacts court decisions involving private wealth transfer. Increasingly, federal law is the central consideration in premortem and postmortem planning for private wealth transfer. Despite this, until recently, little scholarly attention has been paid to this phenomenon; the assumption regarding the centrality of state law, quoted above, having gone largely unquestioned. But now that the "sleeping giant" has awakened, the role that federal law plays in private wealth transfer requires serious and comprehensive academic consideration. This symposium issue of the Vanderbilt Law Review is intended to do just that. There are ten articles addressing various facets of the topic. These are set forth in the same order as the order of the presentations made by the distinguished authors at the symposium that took place at Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville, ennessee earlier this year. A number of the articles are followed by comments by other distinguished scholars, who not only address the particular article, but also use the comment as a platform to explore other aspects of the topic The old paradigm is dead. Private wealth transfer law is NOT just state law. Indeed, in some respects, it is now principally federal law. This increasing federalization and even dominance can be expected to continue apace. While the problems and consequences of federalization are not new to many other areas of law and have received considerable and serious scholarly attention, they are new to private wealth transfer. The way in which the state-federal balance is being struck, the consequences for private wealth transfer flowing from federal involvement, and the principles that should guide courts and legislators in determining the proper state-federal allocation, are all examined with considerable analytic care in these pages. Hopefully, this ...

The individual states have long played a primary role in defining the legal family in the United States, with states often determining who does and does not enjoy the legal status of spouse, parent, and child. Two recent U.S. Supreme Court cases, Astrue v. Capatol and United States v. Windsor,2 acknowledged and affirmed the diverse definitions of family that flow from this federalist approach. Yet these cases do not solidify the states' place in defining family for purposes of marriage, parentage, divorce, and death. Instead, they foreshadow an increasingly federal conception of family status-a conception that values private family support over diversity and pluralism. This Article describes this federalization of family status and then analyzes the ways it furthers the underlying reason for legal family recognition: private family support. Federal agencies and courts have increasingly usurped the states' authority to define family. These decisions are not rooted in rejections of state sovereignty, however, or the diversity and pluralism that flow therefrom. Instead, federalism remains an important value so long as it addresses family dependencies and facilitates the private support of those dependencies. Part II examines the role of federalism in the Supreme Court's Capato and Windsor decisions. Although many commentators have analyzed the deployment of federalism in Windsor, in which the Court struck down a provision of the Defense of Marriage Act, this Article offers the first robust comparison of Windsor and Capato, in which the Court affirmed the Social Security Administration's deference to states' intestacy laws when distributing survivors benefits to children. Although the Court decided neither case on federalism grounds, the Court in both cases affirmed the states' primary role in defining family. Yet developments both before and after Capato and Windsor reveal that federal courts and agencies do not consistently defer to states' authority to define family. In fact, the Supreme Court and other federal ...

The purpose of this paper is to survey the theoretical literature on wealth transfer taxation. The focus is normative: we are looking at the design of an optimal tax structure from the standpoint of both equity and efficiency. The gist of this survey is that the optimal design closely depends on the assumed bequest motives. Alternative bequest motives are thus analyzed either in isolation or combined.

This Article surveys areas of federalization of wealth-transfer law. Federal authorities have little experience in making law that governs wealth transfers, because that function is traditionally within the province of state law. Although state wealth-transfer law has undergone significant modernization over the last few decades, all three branches of the federal government-legislative, judicial, and executive have increasingly gone their own way. Lack of experience and, in many cases, lack of knowledge on the part of federal authorities have not dissuaded them from undermining well- considered state law. The Article covers these topics: federal preemption of several areas of state law, the development of federal common law as a sometime substitute for preempted state law, the federal tax exemption for perpetual trusts, and the right of posthumously conceived children of assisted reproduction to Social Security survivor benefits.

House Resolution 34, which was approved by the House of Delegates during the 1977 session of the Virginia General Assembly, observed that Virginia's inheritance and gift tax laws have remained essentially unchanged for more than 50 years and commissioned a study of those laws "in light of recent developments."' The proponents of House Resolution 34 no doubt had the 1976 amendments to the federal estate and gift tax laws fresh on their minds. But in addition to the federal changes, several of the states have altered their approach to transfer taxation in recent years. These changes expand the options available to Virginia and allow Virginia to draw on the experience of her sister states in assessing those options.

This article examines John Stuart Mill's influential proposal of how to tax wealth transfers. According to Mill, every person should be free to bequeath but not to receive bequest. Mill proposed an upper limit on how much each person could receive from wealth transfers. We discuss three objections against this proposal. The nonseparability objection holds that it is not possible to separate the freedom to give from the freedom to receive. The objection from private property holds that private property includes an unlimited right to dispose of one's assets and that this right is violated under Mill's scheme. The objection from incentives holds that Mill's scheme would have negative effects on people's willingness to work and save. We argue that these objections can be met and that taxing bequeathed wealth according to Mill's scheme is more just and more efficient compared to systems that rely less on wealth transfer taxation.