The Inaugural Lecture of Professor Alexandra Braun

Edinburgh Law School presents the Inaugural Lecture of Professor Alexandra Braun

Testamentary Responsibility

About the Lecture 

Testamentary freedom, that is the freedom to determine the distribution of our assets after we die, is often described as the bedrock principle of succession law. In fact, for many people testamentary freedom is something we have always had, should continue to have, and is therefore both self-evident and untouchable. This emphasis on testamentary freedom and, simultaneously, testator intent, has had significant consequences for how we have come to perceive not just restrictions on this freedom, but also the rationale underpinning various areas of succession law, including intestate succession, as well as the functions of succession law. The aim of this lecture is to challenge testamentary freedom as the organising principle of succession law. The lecture does so by bringing into sharper focus another important value of succession law: ‘responsibility’. The lecture argues in favour of a responsible exercise of testamentary power – an exercise that reflects the relationships that testators leave behind. By exploring the concept of testamentary freedom from a historical, comparative and contextual perspective, the lecture thus aims: i) to deconstruct the prevailing narrative of the concept of testamentary freedom and to show not only its contingency, but also that testamentary power and responsibility are not mutually exclusive concepts; and, ii) to illustrate that shifting our attention to, and acknowledging responsibility as a core value, opens up new and different ways of understanding the purposes of succession law and its underpinning rationales and justifications.

About the Speaker

Alexandra Braun holds the Lord President Reid Chair in Law at the University of Edinburgh.

Professor Braun completed her undergraduate degree in Law at the University of Genoa and received a PhD in Comparative Private Law from the University of Trento. Prior to joining Edinburgh Law School in August 2017, she was Professor of Comparative Private Law at the University of Oxford, as well as a Fellow and Tutor in Law at Lady Margaret Hall.

Professor Braun is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of European and Comparative Law in Oxford and an Honorary Research Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She is also an elected Associate Member of the International Academy of Comparative Law as well as an Academic Member of the International Academy of Estate and Trust Law. Since January 2021 she is Professor Extraordinary at the Department of Private Law of the University of Stellenbosch.

Professor Braun is a Co-Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Private Law and the Programme Director of the LLM in Comparative and European Private Law. She is also Series Editor of the Edinburgh Studies in Law series published by Edinburgh University Press.

Professor Braun has broad research interests in the comparative study of law and legal history. Her current research focuses primarily on the comparative study of both succession law and the law of trusts, as well as on the circulation of legal ideas across legal traditions. She has recently published a monograph with Oxford University Press that provides a comparative study of broken promises of an inheritance: Claiming a Promised Inheritance: A Comparative Study (OUP 2022). 

This lecture will be followed by a reception in the Playfair Library.

This event is free and open to all but registration is required

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