What Do Disgruntled Medieval Knights Have To Do With Your Estate Plan?
If you doubt that law school is the obvious destination for history majors, consider how many legal principles have an obvious, or untold, historical background. It is more than just the abundance of Latin terms. Judges still write about “tipsy coachman” arguments, even though it has been over a century since a coachman drove a carriage on a public street in Florida; if you drive today’s vehicles while tipsy, your chances of getting a DUI are higher than your chances of arriving at the right place for the wrong reasons. People who get injured by drunk drivers can sue the bars where the drivers drank for dram shop liability, even though no one measures alcohol in drams anymore. At first glance, trust law seems unique to our era. We set up trusts to stop Medicaid from forcing our estate to sell our house before our children can inherit it, but Medicaid is a recent phenomenon. Meanwhile, trusts have existed for millennia, but they have adapted to the times. To find out whether a trust can safeguard your family’s financial stability in a changing world, contact a Tampa estate planning lawyer.
Do As the Romans Do, but Only If You’re Dead
Trust law in its earliest form goes back to ancient Rome, which had a practice called fideicommissum. A Roman citizen could declare that, on his death, his property would be transferred to a trustee called a fidelis. The trustee would then distribute the property to the decedent’s heirs according to the decedent’s wishes. In other words, the ancient Roman fideicommissum was a lot like today’s testamentary trusts, where the creation of the trust is a provision of the grantor’s will.
A Safety Net for Those Who Hand Over Their Property to the Phony King of England
Surrendering your property to someone else while you are still alive feels uncomfortably final for most people. The first to run into this problem were landowners in 12th century England. Some of them traveled to the Middle East to fight in the Crusades, and when they did, they transferred their property to the trustees, with instructions on what to do with it. Some of these crusading landowners died during their travels, but some returned alive, and when they tried to take back the property that they had placed in trust, the trustees refused. This led to lawsuits, but the courts sided with the trustees; because the landowners had legally transferred their property to the trustees, this made the trustees the legal owners of the property.
The solution to this problem came centuries later, with the advent of revocable trusts. When you set up a revocable trust, you have the right to take back some or all of the trust property from the trustee as long as you are alive.
Contact David Toback About Estate Planning on the Shoulders of Giants
A Central Florida estate planning lawyer can help you learn from the lessons of the past in building your estate plan. Contact David Toback in Tampa, Florida to set up a consultation.
Source:
penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA*/Fideicommissum.html
