Joint Inaugural Lecture:
"On What Can Be Said to Be Certain in Life: from Death to Tax" 

Professor Irit Samet: "The Posthumous Trust: From Dead Hand to Mortality Management."

Professor Ann Mumford: "Assertive choices and historical dissonance: The complicated inheritance for tax within federalism."

The Dickson Poon School of Law is proud to present our Inaugural Lecture Series. Inaugural Lectures are a celebration of our Professors, as they present an overview of their contribution to their field, as well as highlight its latest developments. The lecture is open to both members of the university community and the wider public, and is followed by a reception in the Great Hall.

"The Posthumous Trust: From Dead Hand to Mortality Management."

Ownership ceases with death. Like all powers – to vote, enter a contract or marry, the power to exert private control over property dies with the owner. This truism, however, did never stopped owners from trying to influence (or dictate) the afterlife of their property. In allowing trusts to operate after the final departure of the settlor, equity provides them with a most powerful tool for satisfying such hopes. The way in which the trustee must follow the deceased settlor’s wishes triggers a unique and serious ‘dead hand’ problem since the equitable title bestowed on beneficiaries is severely restricted by the trustee’s management powers as these are designed by the (now dead) settlor. From the beneficiaries’ perspective, the posthumous trust can be seen as an exercise in overcontrol or an expression of a pathological refusal to reconcile to the fact of one’s mortality. I wish to offer two ways of conceiving these trusts as a justifiable extension of the power of ownership: one is to see these trusts as expressive of the stake people have in what happens in the world after they die. The other is to conceptualise them as a valid response to the way we navigate the consciousness of mortality.

Irit Samet is a Professor of Law at The Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London, where she also serves as the Course Convenor for the core module in Equity & Trusts. She specializes in theory of equity, trust law, and philosophy of private law, with her scholarly contributions focusing on the intersection of private law and morality. She is the author of Equity: Conscience Goes to Market (OUP, 2018) and has co-edited Philosophical Foundations of the Law of Equity (OUP, 2020) and Philosophical Foundations of Express Trust (OUP, 2023). She published papers in leading journals such as the Modern Law Review, Cambridge Law Journal, Law Quarterly Review, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, American Journal of Jurisprudence, and Law Quarterly Review.

Before joining King’s College London, Professor Samet was a college lecturer at the University of Oxford and a lecturer the University of Essex. She has held visiting positions at several universities including Columbia University (NY), EUI (Florence), the University of Turin, UNSW (Sydney), and the University of Queensland (Brisbane). Her work has been widely cited in scholarly as well as judicial contexts. Irit earned her D.Phil from Oxford University following an LLB degree, and a master in Philosophy from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is a member of the editorial board of Jurisprudence and the Oxford Theory of Private Law book series. The Posthumous Trust: From Dead Hand to Mortality Management.

"Assertive choices and historical dissonance: The complicated inheritance for tax within federalism."

In the United States, the division of sovereignty between the states and the federal authorities is something to which the courts are well accustomed. State governments tax separately, for example, from the federal government. This is very different from the United Kingdom. At first glance, beyond the idea of excluding a king, it would appear that little else could be connected between English and American legal foundations of taxation. Any attempt to connect Congress to Parliament falters at the point of Article I, section eight, clause one of the Constitution, imposing the requirement of uniformity on Congress’s power to tax. By comparison, the Bill of Rights places only one restriction on Parliament’s power to tax, in that it is not allowed to give away the power to tax to the king. The English experience, by the time of the adoption of the US Constitution in the late eighteenth century, was distinguished by Parliament’s total control over taxation, to the exclusion of the monarch. There was not then, nor is there now, any substantive similarity between the taxation powers of local UK councils (now) or parishes (then) and the taxation powers of American states.

If taxation in America might be argued to be (as compared with UK law) exceptional, trusts law is not. It is a veritable English transplant, by way of the states, although as the nineteenth century progressed, American trusts law, as a multifaceted collective, chose some different paths, in some respects, from its English roots. If, at its formation, American law established the Constitutional foundations of taxation in ways that could not be sourced to English law, no such effort occurred with trusts, which was ignored by the Constitution, and, in some states, transplanted as half remembered folk law from settlors trying to remember ‘the rules.’ It is fairly clear that federalism, in the US, is complicated.

In the US, some ideas can be explained by looking at English law in 1788 (the date of the ratification of the US Constitution), whereas others are completely original. If a US Supreme Court justice picks up a copy of Blackstone (ideally one from Jefferson or Madison’s library), blowing off the dust while looking for scribbled notes in the corner, it is an assertive choice: this is our inheritance, not our creation. Blackstone would never be consulted, however, for a question regarding tax. Given the interconnectedness of law, however, this boundary does not really make sense.

Areas of law exist in relation to each other. American taxation law is connected with other areas of law, like trusts. When reading American decisions for references to taxation, English legal history may be found at the edges. This inaugural lecture will consider the consequences of encountering references to English law, and English legal history, in American decisions. When searching for discussions of American taxation, references to English legal history may appear unexpectedly, sometimes with dissonance. The description of English history may not ring correct for a scholar based in the UK, researching the law of the United Kingdom in 2024. This lecture will consider ownership of this dissonance. Should the response be to dig a bit further, to discover what English law ‘really’ said in 1781; or, should one acknowledge that, as records of decided cases will only help so much, the impact of a collective history requires careful management?

Ann Mumford specialises in tax law, fiscal institutions and equality. The scope of her published work has ranged from feminist perspectives on taxation law; to, as a contributor to the “new” fiscal sociology movement, the integration of tax legal scholarship into the realm of economic sociology.

As a researcher, Professor Mumford's work has focused on international, comparative, and socio-legal, feminist legal perspectives, particularly those that arise through taxation law. She has been an invited speaker at numerous international conferences and symposia.

Professor Mumford is the author of three monographs: Taxing Culture: Towards A Theory of Tax Collection Law (2002, Aldershot: Ashgate: Socio-Legal Studies Series; General Editor: Philip A. Thomas); Tax Policy, Women and the Law: UK and Comparative Perspectives, Cambridge University Press (2010, Cambridge Tax Law Series – General Editor, John Tiley); and Fiscal Sociology at the Centenary (2019, Palgrave Socio-Legal Series; General Editor: Dave Cowan), which was shortlisted for the SLSA’s Theory and History Prize.