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The writing of culture (ethno-graphy) that has characterized the modern anthropological endeavor has come under critique for measuring the lives of Others according to its own peculiar normative and temporal logics, and then eliding the fact that it is doing so. The same is true of law, where the writing of human action gets figured in ways that always involve some un-ruly combination of legal fact and norm, and the temporal trajectories that are implicit in them. The effect in both modes of knowledge production is a kind of representative impossibility such that the authority claims made by law and ethnography are always exceeded by the actual lives whose measure they take. In this article, I suggest that it is in its confrontation with the lives and times of inheritance in two contexts – in the famous problems posed in Anglo-American law by the Rule Against Perpetuities, and the irresolution of inheritance disputes in Hopi tribal court – that law is most starkly revealed as a kind of ethnography, a writing of culture replete with all the problems of measuring lives that go along with it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When a transfer of real property creates a future interest in a party without expressly providing whether that party must survive all others in possession prior, the common law has traditionally refused to imply such a requirement. Recently, various reform movements have proposed reversing this rule. Where such a reversal fails to likewise negate the reversion created by the change, the transferor-possessor of the reversion faces complicated tax issues as a result. In this Article, the author provides an overview of the various attempts to reverse the rule and goes through the complicated actuarial mathematics that are required to assess the tax liability of the possessor of the reversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on New Zealand's rule against perpetuities found in both the common and in statutory law. In common law, the rule focuses on when an interest vest which requires its ascertainment, satisfaction and the interest in class gift. The Perpetuities Act 1964 states that where there are no such lives the perpetuity period is simply 21 years and retains the common law perpetuity period of a life or lives in being plus 21 years.

The article focuses on future interests in personal property in the United States. Property may be of either limited or unlimited duration. At least, this is the doctrine of common law with regard to land. Property in land is called an estate. Owing to familiar doctrines of the feudal law, the only future estates of realty which the law originally allowed were estates which fitted on to previous estates, without cutting them short, or leaving a gap. There was no tenure, and there were no estates, in chattels personal ; absolute property was the only kind of property recognized.

The article discusses the nature of the desirable statutory remedy for the common law Rule against Perpetuities with reference to a Massachusetts statute. The statute seeks more rational application of the rule and elimination of certain anomalous exceptions and extensions. According to the Rule, the determination of the validity of an interest is done prospectively. The statute permits the court to examine the facts that actually occur. It also seeks to change the penalty for the violation of the Rule. It allows the court to reform the gift so that the testator's wishes are carried out to the maximum extent allowed by the Rule.

Discusses the common-law rule against perpetuities in the United States. Evidence of certain good qualities in the rule; Penalty for violating the rule; Application of the rule against perpetuities to options; Possibilities of reverter and rights of entry exempted from the rule; Practical problem of judicial administration.