Risks, Benefits, Opportunities, and Electronic Formalities in the Law of Wills
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Traditional “formalities” in the law of wills—including formal requirements for revocation by destruction—contemplate paper documents, wet signatures, and testators and witnesses in the physical presence of one another. Unless these traditional requirements have been modified by legislation, wills made using one or more electronic formalities will not meet the formal requirements for a valid will. Traditional wills formalities have become something of an outlier as the use of electronic text, records, signatures, and witnessing has become routine in many spheres, including for the creation and storage of valid legal agreements. The special nature of wills, and their consequent vulnerability to fraud and reliance on documentary evidence of intent, has been cited as a justification for retaining traditional formalities. This article examines the risks, benefits, and opportunities associated with electronic formalities, as well as their implications for wills storage, the assessment of testamentary capacity, and related issues. It also evaluates the adequacy of dispensing provisions as an alternative to electronic formalities. The article includes contributions by coauthors in four common law jurisdictions—England and Wales, British Columbia, Queensland, and New York—with a discussion of how the risks, benefits, and opportunities presented by electronic formalities and wills have been perceived and balanced within each of these jurisdictions. Les « formalités » traditionnelles du droit des testaments — y compris les exigences formelles liées à la révocation du testament par destruction — impliquent des documents papier, des signatures manuscrites, et des testateurs et témoins physiquement présents les uns avec les autres. À moins que ces exigences traditionnelles n’aient été modifiées par la législation, les testaments rédigés à l’aide d’une ou plusieurs formalités électroniques ne rempliront pas les conditions formelles requises pour un testament valide. Les formalités traditionnelles des testaments font désormais figure d’exception considérant l’utilisation de textes, d’enregistrements, de signatures et de témoins électroniques qui est devenue courante dans de nombreux domaines, y compris pour la création et le stockage d’accords juridiques valides. Or, la nature particulière des testaments, et leur vulnérabilité conséquente à la fraude, ainsi que leur dépendance aux preuves écrites de l’intention du testateur ont été invoquées pour justifier le maintien des formalités traditionnelles. Cet article examine les risques, les avantages et les opportunités liés aux formalités électroniques, ainsi que les répercussions de leur utilisation sur la conservation des testaments, l’évaluation de la capacité testamentaire et d’autres questions connexes. Il évalue également la pertinence des dispensing provisions comme alternative aux formalités électroniques. L’article comprend des contributions de co-auteurs issus de quatre juridictions de common law — l’Angleterre et le Pays de Galles, la Colombie-Britannique, le Queensland et New York — ainsi qu’une discussion sur la façon dont les risques, les avantages et les opportunités présentés par les formalités électroniques et les testaments ont été perçus et équilibrés au sein de chacune de ces juridictions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.033 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.063 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".