Robert H. Sitkoff (Harvard Law School) and Robert Niles-Weed recently published, Trusts Without Borders, 2026. Provided below is the abstract:
There is broad consensus that the law of conflict of trust laws is outdated. Both the American Law Institute and the Uniform Law Commission have initiated reform projects to address this obsolescence. But there is no consensus around what went wrong or how to fix it. This short article summarizes our earlier paper, “The Twenty-First Century Revolution in Conflict of Trust Laws,” 79 Tulane Law Review 1013 (2023), providing a historically, theoretically, and institutionally grounded account of the rise and fall of the old regime with an eye toward informing ongoing law reform efforts. We show that the prevailing regime—that of the 1971 Restatement (Second) of Conflict of Laws—was purpose-built to encode then-common norms of trust law and practice. We explain how and why modern trust law and practice has departed from those norms, upending the Restatement’s foundational assumptions. In the Restatement’s era, conflicts of trust laws rarely arose and were easily resolved through reliance on the locational anchors of land, probate, and court supervision. Today, by contrast, provoking a conflict of trust laws by drafting a trust to capture the benefits of interstate variation in law is a routine estate planning strategy, and the locational anchors of land, probate, and court supervision have become unmoored. Informed by this understanding of the old regime’s obsolescence, we offer tentative suggestions for the law reform efforts currently underway.