Criticism and Humor
Because these hypothetical scenarios show how a reasonable gift can be voided based on so unlikely an outcome, they have generated much criticism among legal scholars, resulting in the abrogation of the rule against perpetuities by statute in many jurisdictions. Many U.S. States have adopted laws mollifying the application of the rule by requiring courts to "wait and see" for a period of years, sometimes as long as 360 years (which effectively negates the possibility of litigation ensuing during the life of any person alive at the same time of the author of the will).
Some jurisdictions have ameliorated specific problems of the rule by creating statutory presumptions to counter those problems. Under such statutes, for example, a woman is presumed to no longer be fertile after a particular age (typically 55), and a gift to a person's widow or widower is presumed to vest in whoever was that person's spouse at the time of the gift.
These rules have also long been a target of legal humorists.
Read more about this topic: Illustrations Of The Rule Against Perpetuities
Famous quotes containing the words criticism and, criticism and/or humor:
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“Nine-tenths of the value of a sense of humor in writing is not in the things it makes one write but in the things it keeps one from writing. It is especially valuable in this respect in serious writing, and no one without a sense of humor should ever write seriously. For without knowing what is funny, one is constantly in danger of being funny without knowing it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)