Albany Law’s Carla Spivack Ranked Among Nation’s Top Trusts and Estates Scholars

Albany Law School David Josiah Brewer Distinguished Professor of Law Carla Spivack has been recognized among the top estates and trusts law scholars in the country, based on data from HeinOnline. 

HeinOnline, an online research platform, highlights the scholarly impact of ABA-accredited law schools by identifying the most-cited authors within 25 major legal subject areas.

For each subject, citation and usage data are drawn exclusively from HeinOnline articles that are assigned one or more PathFinder Subjects mapped to that category. HeinOnline the uses its ScholarRank formula, applied separately for each subject, to produce a top 100 list of influential authors. 

Prof. Spivack was ranked 41st among 100 estates and trusts law scholars nationwide.

Estates and trusts were the PathFinder subjects applied to determine the top scholars in this area. 

Spivack’s scholarship includes: 

• Developing Professional Skills: Trusts and Estates (2022) (with Karen Sneddon).
• The Smart Woman’s Guide to Property Law (2021).
• Experiencing Trusts and Estates (2d. ed., 2021) (with Deborah Gordon, Karen Sneddon & Allison Tait).

Articles

• The Estate Tax, Inequality and the Problem of Public Choice, 20 Pittsburgh Tax Review 397 (2023).
• Estate Planning for the Apocalypse, 49 ACTEC Law Journal 87 (2023).
• The Happy Families of Tax Law, 100 North Carolina Law Review 601 (2022).
• The Ghost of Coverture Past, Estate Planning (Sept. 2022).
• Are Women Human? Public Space and the Semiotics of Exclusion, 41 Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 190 (2021).

Forthcoming

• Donative Freedom, Disrupted, Brooklyn Law Review (forthcoming 2025) (with Deborah Gordon).
• Trouble in Coverture: Widows, Property Transmission, and the Social Imaginary, in Married Women and the Law in Britain, North America, and the Common Law World (forthcoming 2026).
• The Best of Trusts, the Worst of Trusts: Trusts in the Context of Climate Change, in Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Private Law (forthcoming 2026).
• A Beneficiary’s Creditors’ Access to Beneficiary’s Trust Assets: A Comparative Analysis, in Oxford Handbook of Comparative Trust Law (forthcoming 2025).

Only authors that have an ABA-approved law school designated as their institutional affiliation on their HeinOnline Author Profile Page qualify for inclusion in this ranking. In addition, only the author’s articles that contain PathFinder Subjects mapped to the relevant ranking subject are counted. 

William S. Hein & Co., Inc. has been serving the library community since the 1920s by publishing books, producing microfiche, and, now in the digital age, creating multidisciplinary databases that go beyond just law—gathering reputable primary and secondary sources from around the world to make research easier for students, faculty, librarians, attorneys, governments, organization, and individuals of all skills.