Law Quadrangle Notes on Drafting Errors, Living Wills
The Winter 2005 Edition of Law Quadrangle Notes, put out by my alma mater (The University of Michigan Law School), recently arrived in my mailbox. Usually the publication doesn't interest me very much, as it discusses law at a theoretical (rather than a practical) level. But this time I found relevant articles by two of my favorite professors:
1. Professor Lawrence Waggoner has worked extensively on the Uniform Probate Code and a restatement of the law relating to Wills and other transfers. The article contained in this pdf document talks about changing the way errors in Wills are handled. Traditionally, judges have been very strict on the topic of errors in a Will -- if your attorney made a mistake, the courts would not act to correct it. The result has been lots of invalidated Wills, lots of Wills that don't carry out the intent of their creator, and lots of malpractice suits against hapless attorneys. Professor Waggoner and others now seem to be embracing a more pragmatic approach to errors, one that allows court "to excuse harmless execution errors and to reform mistaken terms in wills." This strikes me as a win-win-win result: the intent of the Will's creator is honored, the creator's beneficiaries receive the property to which they are entitled, and the attorney avoids a malpractice suit.
2. I've written at length here about the limitations of living wills. In this pdf document, Professor Carl Schneider and his co-author, Angela Fagerlin, examine living wills from a bioethics perspective, and their conclusion is even more harsh than mine:
"The living will has failed, and it is time to say so."
The two also argue (as I have) that powers of attorney can do what living wills have failed to do.
Bookmark: 
