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Vanderbilt Law Review

First Page

963

Abstract

THE BEST OF TRUSTS AND ESTATES-ESTATE PLANNING

There are one hundred and four articles arranged in eight chapters entitled, "Estate Planning-A Panoramic View," "Using the Marital Deduction, "Income Tax Planning, " "Making the Most of Gifts,""Minimizing Administration Problems," "How to Handle Business Interests," "Arranging Life Insurance," and "Drafting Wills and Trusts." The citation and date of the original publication of each article is stated, and in many instances there is an addendum by the author which brings the article up to the date of the book. In addition there are excellent introductory commentaries by the editors at the beginning of each chapter which reflect helpfully the current status of our intellectual thought and maturity.

This reader feels that the book becomes dramatically more valuable and interesting after Chapter One. The articles on the marital deduction, income tax planning, etc., as above listed, provide excellent selections reflecting the competing values which have been developed and argued during the ten-year period, and it is a pleasure to have them all together in one volume.

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AN ELECTRONIC CASH AND CREDIT SYSTEM

"Jurimetrics, "cybernetics, "electronic data processing," "information retrieval" and a myriad of like terms represent the nova lingua of the legal age in which we live. This is the era of the mechanized brain-a "brain" which plays with numbers and never forgets what it is told. It is perhaps too early to say whether the computer will prove to be a panacea for mounting problems of accounting in the modern commercial community. However, it is not too early to predict that the computer and its counterparts will play an increasing role in the lives of all, providing, of course, that we can reach some accommodation between the computer's labor-saving characteristics and its proclivity for invading individual privacy, which to some is intolerable. After all, the gossip who forgets nothing, and tells all indiscriminately to anyone who asks, may be something more than a mere nuisance. The implications of the policy problems raised by the preceding paragraph of this review are not the subject of this book. The authors, students at the Harvard Graduate School of Business, are concerned only with describing a computerized system by which goods may be distributed for cash held by the purchaser's bank or financing institution without the intervention of the present checking system whereby orders are drawn by the purchaser on the third party (bank) holding the drawer's funds.

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