Attorney James Spica Published in ACTEC Law Journal

An article by Dickinson Wright Attorney James P. Spica, entitled “Means to an End,” appears in the most recent issue of The ACTEC Law Journal, the scholarly journal of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel.

The article concerns electively forcing future interests to vest, under the laws of states that have enacted liberal perpetuities reform, in order to comply with federal tax rules against perpetuities. Mr. Spica, an ACTEC Fellow, is a nationally recognized authority on the article’s subject, having drafted the perpetuities reform proposal enacted as the Michigan Personal Property Trust Perpetuities Act of 2008, having published several articles on tax rules against perpetuities in the American Bar Association’s (ABA’s) Real Property, Trust and Estate Law Journal (2006, 2009, and 2013) as well as The Wayne Law Review (2014), and having spoken on the rule against perpetuities in estate planning as a featured speaker, sponsored by Brown Brothers Harriman Trust Company, at the North Carolina Bar Association’s 34th Annual Estate Planning and Fiduciary Law Program (2013) and as a regular member of the faculty of the Annual Probate and Estate Planning Institute of the Michigan Institute of Continuing Legal Education (ICLE).

In addition to being a member of the ACTEC State Law Committee, Mr. Spica is the ABA Advisor to the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws’ Drafting Committee on Divided Trusteeships, a member of the Michigan ICLE Probate and Estate Planning Advisory Board, and a recent past member (2006-2015) of the Council (governing body) of the Probate and Estate Planning Section of the State Bar of Michigan. He clerked for Hon. Richard C. Wilbur on the United States Tax Court (1985) and taught taxation, trusts, and decedents’ estates as an Assistant/Associate Professor of Law at the University of Detroit Mercy (1989-2000, tenured 1996).

To see the full text of Mr. Spica’s ACTEC Law Journal article, please click here.