Succession

Succession: Families, Property and Death is designed not only to expound succession law in Australia as it is, including the recognition, if at all, of Aboriginal customary law, but also to consider the law in its national and international setting by considering rules of private international law; to reveal how it has developed by taking an historical focus; to consider the objectives sought to be satisfied by succession law as a basis of understanding and for the evaluation of existing rules; and to consider some comparative approaches to the problems of inheritance.

As a teaching tool, it extracts cases at length rather than in small pieces to enable students to develop a sense of the forms of judicial argument which are used in succession law, allowing for a deeper analysis of the judgments than has traditionally been possible.

As a practitioner resource, this text also covers comprehensively and critically such bread-and-butter topics of a succession lawyer as formal validity of a will, challenges to that validity, dispensing with formal requirements for a will, rectification, and claims for a family provision order.

Features

Includes new commentary on:

• digital property
• Jewish inheritance law
• definition of family for succession purposes, including Aboriginal concept of kinship and posthumous children
• joint tenancy and the right of survivorship
• voluntary assisted dying
• Benjamin orders
• disputes about disposal of the body
• recognition of aboriginal customary law and tradition in distribution on intestacy
• determining capacity and dealing with future loss of capacity
• electronic signing and witnessing of wills
• formal validity rules and dispensing powers
• sale of specific gift after death
• ademption of gifts
• the forfeiture rule
• family provision
• administration of the estate

Related Titles

• Dal Pont, Law of Succession, 3rd edition
• Dal Pont, Law of Executors and Administrators, 1st edition
• De Groot & Nickel, Family Provision in Australia, 6th edition
• Mackie & Histed, Principles of Australian Succession Law, 4th edition

About the Authors

Rosalind Croucher AM is President of the Australian Human Rights Commission. Prior to this, she was the President of the Australian Law Reform Commission from 2009 to 2017. Professor Croucher has had a distinguished career in legal education, with more than 25 years in university teaching and management, including at UNSW , Macquarie University and the University of Sydney. She has lectured and published extensively, mainly in the fields of equity, trusts, property, inheritance and legal history.

Prue Vines is Professor, Director of First Year Studies and Co-Director of the Private Law Research and Policy Group in the Faculty of Law at UNSW. Professor Vines was also Visiting Professor at Strathclyde University Law School, Scotland, from 2006 to 2017. She is the recipient of a number of teaching awards. Her research interests include torts, particularly negligence and apologies in civil liability, and succession law, including the impact of succession law on Indigenous people in Australia, and she has published widely in these areas.