Uniform Law Commission

Of course.

The Uniform Determination of Death Act, the UDDA, to be very specific, and again, you know, language matters, words matter here, uh, was approved by the Uniform Law Commission in 1980.

It was endorsed by two groups, AMA and the ABA, American Bar Association, recommended to the states by the President Commission in 1981.

And what it says is that a person is dead who sustained either irreversible cessation of circulatory respiratory function or irreversible cessation of all function of the entire brain, including the brainstem.

Interest on loans and inflation of the paper bills of credit, leaving the food producers and others in a state of peonage and involuntary servitude, constituting the taking of private property for the benefit and use of others without just compensation against the Constitution.

Now, the Council of State Governments has now been absorbed into such things as the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, whose headquarters office is located at 676 North Street.

Or excuse me, that's wrong, folks.

It's 676 North St. Clair Street, Suite 1700, Chicago, Illinois, 60611.

See Public Law eighty-nine dash seven nineteen, legislative history, pages thirty-seven twenty-two.

Also, see CRS five one one oh six.

The Uniform Commercial Code was, of course, promulgated by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws in collusion with American Law Institute for the, quote, "banking and business interests," unquote.

See the Handbook of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, nineteen sixty-six edition, pages one fifty-two and one fifty-three.

They had, and without getting too technical about it, all 50 state legislatures, and by the way, governments around the world have done this now too, made a very minor, or at least seemingly minor, modification to the Uniform Commercial Code.

There's some version of the UCC in law in every one of the 50 states, and the idea was, you know, we don't want wildly different business laws in the different states, so the states have kind of worked together through the Uniform Law Commission to come up with similar business laws.

Well, they made a very seemingly minor modification in Article 8 of the UCC that will enable the mega banks and the big governments of the world to seize everyone's stocks and bonds in the event of a major global economic crisis.

It sounds too crazy to be true, but it is true.

State law may authorize the mechanics of decanting, but the federal tax consequences of a particular decanting transaction still deserve careful review before it happens, not after.

So where does the underlying legal framework come from? In 2015, the Uniform Law Commission, the organization responsible for drafting model legislation that states can adopt to create consistency across the country, approved the Uniform Trust Decanting Act as a final act at its annual conference in Williamsburg, Virginia.

That model act became the template states have drawn from as they've written their own decanting statutes over the past decade, which is exactly why you see recurring structural features, trustee discretion tiers, beneficiary notice periods, special needs provisions, showing up in slightly different forms from Delaware to Florida to New York to South Dakota to Virginia to Ohio to Washington, D.C., Here's how sophisticated families approach this.

They don't assume an old, irrevocable trust is permanently stuck with outdated terms, but they also don't assume decanting is a simple do-it-yourself fix.