Rule against perpetuities

[ClintPhoenix]

@Lemur866

That’s exactly the sort of thing I was curious about. We have laws that say your wishes should be followed, even after you are dead. But there have to be limits, otherwise living people would become enslaved by the dead. And that would be just creepy.

While a trustee can be restricted by the settlor (person creating trust), the trustee or beneficiaries could attempt to vary the trust later by applying to court. So, I guess it would have been more accurate to say that the best you could do is make it difficult to change the purpose of the trust.

Now I’m writing this without referring to my trusts books, so I won’t get more specific than that (because I really don’t want to review trusts!) There may be other ways to modify a trust, especially if the settlor gives broad discretion and powers to the trustee.

I’m not familiar with how the Rhodes beneficiaries were changed, but in my jurisdiction, conditions that are discriminatory can be struck down for being against public policy. Conditions that something illegal be done are also against public policy.

[Tim_T-Bonham.net]

@ChockFullOfHeadyGoodness

How about a will disposing of property for a specific purpose? The Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles is on land which Col. Griffith donated to the city. He also left money to the city with the condition that it be used to build an observatory and that admission never be charged. How enforceable is that provision? Legally is there any way to prevent the city from saying “we’re broke, we have to charge admission now”? Griffith died in 1919.
If this is too tangential I can move it to its own thread.

Often such documents have ‘reversions’, which specify what is to be done if the specific conditions no longer apply. Usually, it ‘reverts’ to some other beneficiary.

For example, here in Minnesota, we had lots of one-room country schoolhouses that were built on a single acre of land donated out of the corner of an area that someone owned. Usually with the provision that if it ceased to be used for a school, the land (and anything built on it) reverts to the donor, or his heirs.

Since most of these country schools have been consolidated now, those provisions are coming into effect. The country school that I walked to as a child was consolidated, and the land & schoolhouse reverted back to the great-grandchildren of the original donor of the land. (But since their parents had sold the farm, there was a question if it went to them or to the current owner of the land. I believe they solved this by selling the property, and splitting the proceeds.)

Regarding the Griffith Observatory, possibly the original document contains such a ‘reversion’ clause. The beneficiary of that clause could certainly argue that if the city is “too broke” to operate the observatory, then they have the option of closing it and allowing it to revert to the alternate beneficiary. But they can’t just keep it anyway, and use it for something else.

[Wendell_Wagner]

If a will makes some charitable bequest that’s clearly absurd, the executors may petition a court to change the bequest to something as close as possible to the specification of the will that still makes sense:

Cy-près doctrine

A friend of mine has written a short book about the cy-près doctrine - The Great Philanthropists & the Problem of “Donor Intent” by Martin Morse Wooster. It’s got some political ranting in it that I don’t happen to agree with, but it has a lot of useful information about the cy-près doctrine. It’s a handbook for people who wish to set up foundations or other charitable bequests in their wills. It tells of some foundations which ended up doing things that the people who willed the money for the foundation probably really didn’t want the foundation to do.