Why Trusts and Estates Became a Single Field

The modern treatment of trusts and estates as a unified field is not accidental. It reflects a deliberate shift in how American law conceptualized donative transfers.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American law schools taught trusts, wills, and future interests as separate subjects, reflecting a fragmented approach to the law of donative transfers.

That division began to collapse in the late 1920s, when Columbia Law School undertook a deliberate reform of its curriculum. As part of an effort to move away from Harvard Law School’s Langdellian model, Professor Richard Powell reorganized the separate courses on wills, trusts, and future interests into a single course titled Trusts and Estates. In 1932, Powell published Cases and Materials on Trusts and Estates, the first casebook designed for a combined course.

In the decades that followed, other leading scholars produced similar casebooks, and the unified approach became standard in American legal education. By the 1980s, the separate course on trusts had largely disappeared, and the combined “trusts and estates” framework had become dominant in both teaching and professional institutions.

The current separation of the Restatements into “Trusts” and “Property: Donative Transfers” reflects an earlier conceptual era—one that no longer aligns with teaching or practice.

Series Navigation

• Overview: Why Is There a Push for a New Restatement of Trusts and Estates?
• Previous: Time for a New Restatement? Why This Question Has Become More Pressing
• Next: What Restatements Are Supposed to Do—and When They Fail

Sources

• Thomas P. Gallanis, Time for a New Restatement, Probate & Property, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Jan./Feb. 2026), available on SSRN:
  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6123049