The law of trusts and estates is generally considered the body of law which governs the management of personal affairs and the disposition of property of an individual in anticipation of the event of such person's incapacity or death, also known as the law of successions in civil law. Its techniques are also used to fulfil the wishes of philanthropic bequests or gifts through the creation, maintenance and supervision of charitable trusts.

In some jurisdictions, such as the United States, it can overlap with the area that has come to be known as elder law that deals not only with estate planning but other issues that face the elderly, such as home care, long term care insurance or social security or disability benefits. There may also be overlap with areas of the law touching on End-of-life issues, not solely for the elderly, but also persons with terminal conditions.

In common law, an estate consisted of the tangible assets of real and personal property which belong to a natural person. The property of the estate must either be bequeathed through a will or transferred through the laws of intestacy if there is no will. A will is the most commonly used legal instrument for the distribution of the property of a deceased person. Before property can be disposed of pursuant to the terms of a will, the will must be submitted to a probate court having jurisdiction of the estate of the deceased. Probate is often considered a relatively lengthy and expensive process, albeit one which may provide greater safeguards with regard to the rights of a deceased person's beneficiaries, though probate often is contested by creditors or disgruntled members of the family of the deceased who feel they have not received their fair share of the deceased's property.

Jesse Dukeminier (August 12, 1925 – April 20, 2003) was a professor of law for 40 years at the University of California, Los Angeles, and authored or co-authored a significant number of articles and textbooks in the areas of property law, wills, trusts, and estates. His two major textbooks on property law and on wills, trusts, and estates are the most widely used books in their separate fields.^{[citation needed]} Updates are still being produces to the text with Dukeminier name (with coauthors) on the work.

Dukeminier was born in West Point, Mississippi in 1925 and received a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1948, and his Juris Doctor from Yale in 1951 before briefly entering the practice of law with a Wall Street law firm. He then taught law at the University of Kentucky College of Law, and visited at Harvard and the University of Chicago before taking a position at UCLA in 1963.