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Publication Date

2006

Abstract

Richard Wellman was a national treasure. He was our most knowledgeable and influential authority on probate procedure, that is, on the processes for administering decedents' estates. By the middle decades of the twentieth century, when Wellman's career took shape, many American probate courts were a disgrace. Their rules, mostly embodied in state statutes, required court supervision of the most routine steps in the work of winding up the estate, paying the creditors, and transferring the remaining property to the heirs or devisees. Lawyers, probate judges, and court functionaries prospered doing makework at the expense of widows and orphans and charities. Wellman devoted his life to cleaning up American probate. He worked mainly through the Uniform Law Commission, which in the mid-1960s chose him to be the Reporter and chief architect for a reformed probate system, now known as the Uniform Probate Code (UPC). Wellman led a team of able co-Reporters, including William F. Fratcher, Edward C. Halbach, Jr., and Eugene F. Scoles. The Uniform Law Commission promulgated the Code in 1969.

In the original UPC and in subsequent revisions and additions, Wellman enshrined two central principles of reform. One great initiative, inspired by English and Commonwealth practice, was to dispense with close court supervision in routine, uncontested probates. In UPC jurisdictions, family members or lawyers process most decedents' estates rapidly, with only minimal court involvement. When, however, any interested party wishes to have the protection of traditional, court-supervised procedure, that party can insist on having the estate so administered. The result is that high-safeguard procedure survives for the few troubled cases that need it, but ordinary estates are processed cheaply and rapidly under the streamlined administrative procedures that Wellman drafted.

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