University of North Carolina School of Law Carolina Law Scholarship Repository Faculty Publications Faculty Scholarship 2013 Escaping the Malthusian Trap: Dynasty Trusts for Serious Dynasts John V. Orth University of North Carolina School of Law,
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[email protected]. ESCAPING THE MALTHUSIAN TRAP DYNASTY TRUSTS FOR SERIOUS DYNASTS John V. Orth† HE CENTURIES-LONG HISTORY of Anglo-American proper- ty law can be told as a struggle between the dynastic im- pulse that seeks to tie up a family’s property forever and the public policy of providing an opportunity for the tal- Tented and ambitious to acquire property (and eventually found their own dynasties). From the beginning, an estate in fee simple was in- heritable – as indicated by the formula “to A and his heirs” – but when it also became alienable, the risk emerged that one unwise descendant could bring the dynasty to an abrupt end.1 The effort to limit descent to the “heirs of the body” seemed to offer a solution, turning the fee simple into a series of life estates in successive de- scendants. But English judges defeated this attempt by construing † John Orth is the William Rand Kenan, Jr.