Allison Anna Tait on the Law of High-Wealth Families

In this episode, Allison Anna Tait, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Richmond School of Law, discusses her article "The Law of High-Wealth Exceptionalism," which will be published in the Alabama Law Review. Tait begins by describing "family constitutions," which extremely high-wealth families use in order to help preserve their wealth and facilitate dispute resolution. She observes that many wealth managers strongly recommend such constitutions, and encourage families to conceptualize themselves as semi-sovereign entities, ideally independent of government regulation. She also discusses some of the legal tools that extremely wealthy families use to avoid regulation, oversight, and taxation, including trusts, family offices, and private foundations. She argues that this ideology and the legal tools that facilitate it are anti-democratic and harm the rest of the population. And she argues that we should consider reforms to help mitigate this problem, including a revitalization of the estate tax. Tait is on Twitter at @athenais1674.This episode was hosted by Brian L. Frye, Spears-Gilbert Associate Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky College of Law. Frye is on Twitter at @brianlfrye. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.