The below message is posted as a courtesy to Carla Spivack, Professor of Law, Albany Law School.
The Sixth Biennial Critical Trusts and Estates Conference at the University of Richmond School of Law October 9-10, 2026 invites proposals for papers or panels to be submitted by June 15. We welcome papers that interrogate the role of inheritance, trusts, and estates in shaping and sustaining structures of power, including but not limited to those organized around race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, immigration, and nation. We are particularly interested in work that explores how wealth transmission both reflects and produces economic and power relations and that draws on a range of critical traditions such as feminist legal theory, critical race theory, LatCrit, queer theory, disability studies, postcolonial theory, and related approaches.
Possible topics include (but are not limited to): the racialized and gendered dimensions of inheritance and family formation; the relationship between succession law and colonialism or global inequality; the role of trusts and estates in climate governance and intergenerational justice; and the ways private wealth structures interact with public law and democratic institutions. We also welcome papers addressing today’s trusts and estates “hot topics,” like the reformation of irrevocable trusts, the policy/history of testamentary freedom, and trust privacy/secrecy.
Please send 250-300 word abstracts to: atait@richmond.edu and cspiv@albanylaw.edu by June 15.