Heh.
My first boss at the PD’s office told us about a time when he was up against a female prosecutor who, in the middle of arguing a motion, gave a muffled shriek and leapt away from her table. The judge asked her what was wrong and she pointed at the table, explaining there was a bug crawling on her notepad.
My boss immediately rose and said, “Move to quash, Your Honor.”
And lives at Blackacre?
So you couldn’t make a trust that expire "21 years after the Disney Coporation loses copyright to the characters in the movie “Tangled”? Even though both Disney and Tangled both now exist and copyright is (theoretically) limited? If so, how does the current state of copyright law not violate the RAP?
It is a common law rule, and there is no federal common law, see Erie Railroad (I think, it was a quarter century ago). So federal laws don’t have a RAP. Second, and more importantly, corporations are not people. Corporations are the fascist bedrock of this goosestepping strip searching for a speeding tickets love it or leave it ACLU free nation!! Laws apply even less to corporations than they do governments.
To sum up: RAP does not have an affect (or is it effect) on federal copyright laws. Which, by the way, are currently written at the behest of Disney, as you have so adroitly pointed out.
It is “effect.” “Effect” is a noun, which too many people replace with “impact.” “Affect” is the verb, unless you are referring to a psychological condition.
Quite right.
“En ventre sa mere” is the critical rule and you can’t be en ventre while in a test-tube. 
Ah thankyou I’d forgotten all that. Far in the misty past.
Sadly the Wiki article made complete sense, even worse I found it interesting. 
Its the rationale for placing an estate in the hands of trustees to hold for the life of the widow/er then in remainder to the heirs - as opposed to creating a life estate for the widow in her own hands. Actually we can do that here but its rare.
The one has nothing to do with the other. But as a rule, the legislature can always change the common law, including the RAP – common law is the body of rules that obtains when the legislature hasn’t spoken.
–Cliffy
Personally, I found the discussion in Wikipedia a little difficult to follow (and I feel sure that a non-lawyer would have even more trouble). I prefer the description in Black’s:
“Rule in Shelley’s Case. (18c) Property. The rule that if — in a single grant — a freehold estate is given to a person and a remainder is given to the person’s heirs, the remainder belongs to the named person and not the heirs, so that the person is held to have a fee simple absolute. • The rule, which dates from the 14th century but draws its name from the famous 16th-century case, has been abolished in most states. Wolfe v. Shelley, 76 Eng. Rep. 206 (K.B. 1581).
“[T]he rule in Shelley’s Case, the Don Quixote of the law, which, like the last knight errant of chivalry, has long survived every cause that gave it birth and now wanders aimlessly through the reports, still vigorous, but equally useless and dangerous.” Stamper v. Stamper, 28 S.E. 20, 22 (N.C. 1897).”
Incidentally, I checked to see if the discussion of the rule against perpetuities is clearer in the novel The Descendants, upon which the movie is based. The novel does not mention the rule, and the facts are a bit different: the property is controlled by its owners, and the narrator simply has a larger share than the other owners.
I took Property last year and this is how it was explained to me:
Say you have a nice homestead that you want to keep in the family, but you have a worthless, ne’er do well son. You want his kids to have the property when they grow older, but you are afraid that your son will sell the property and fritter the proceeds away on stuffed animal claw machines.
One thing you could do is give your son a life estate and leave the remainder to his heirs, that way with a life estate, he can’t sell the fee simple in the property. Ah, but the Rule in Shelley’s Case holds that since he has a life estate and a remainder in his heirs, that is in effect, the whole fee simple, so he has everything and can sell.
I think all states have abolished the rule which was originally decided to prevent people from getting around estate taxes by doing the above, but it can screw with a title search for transfers before the rule was abolished. See also Doctrine of Worthier Title.
I had no problem with how it was handled in the movie. This thread is quite interesting, but the film would have come to a screeching halt while they stopped to explain all the legalese.
What we needed to know: Clooney and his relatives need to make a decision regarding what to do with their land, and he’s been put in charge. Most want to sell, some don’t. And on with the story. It worked for me.
Oh, I don’t think we needed a detailed legal discussion. Really, we didn’t even need the reference to the rule against perpetuities that we got. What I would have liked would have been something like this: “Trusts aren’t allowed to last forever, so the princess’s will said that the trust would have to be dissolved within 21 years after all of her children were dead. Great-uncle Joe died 14 years ago, which leaves us with another 7 years to go at most.”
The author modeled this story after the Campbell Estate Trust in Hawaii. Established in 1900, the trust expired in 2000 and the majority(176) of heirs(save for 3) decided to form the “James Campbell Company”.