Electronic-Wills Legislation: The Uniform Act versus Australian and Canadian Alternatives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Electronic wills, created on a computer and never executed on paper, are valid in only a few American jurisdictions today. Nonetheless, in 2019 the Uniform Law Commission promulgated the Uniform Electronic Wills Act and recommended it for adoption in every state. This article examines the Uniform Act and identifies weaknesses in its statutory blueprint. The article also challenges the proposition that electronic wills are appropriately dealt with under Uniform legislation. As an alternative, the article proposes that American states direct their attention to laws long in effect throughout Australia and in parts of Canada that validate electronic wills (along with audio- and video-wills) through harmless-error rules. Instead of creating a formalizing mechanism for e-wills, these foreign laws are remedial, allowing courts to probate e-wills that were improperly formalized under statutes that continue to call for paper wills. The article assesses the advantages and disadvantages of the two competing legislative models and argues that the foreign model is superior. Finally, the article suggests language for American statutes patterned after Australian and Canadian legislation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".