About

SUSAN N. GARY, Professor Emerita and formerly Orlando J. and Marian H. Hollis Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, received her B.A. from Yale University and her J.D. from Columbia University. Before entering academia she practiced with Mayer, Brown & Platt in Chicago, and with DeBandt, van Hecke & Lagae in Brussels.  Professor Gary has taught trusts and estates, estate planning, nonprofit organizations, and an undergraduate course on law and families. She continues to teach trusts and estates and nonprofit organizations.  She has written and spoken about the regulation of charities, fiduciary duties including the prudent investor standard, stewardship trusts as a new form of business ownership, the definition of family for inheritance purposes, donor intent in connection with restricted charitable gifts, and the use of mediation to manage conflict in the estate planning context.  She served as a trustee on the University’s Board of Trustees.

Professor Gary is an Academic Fellow and former Regent of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel, the preeminent U.S. organization for estate planning lawyers and academics.  She is also served on the Council of the Real Property, Trust and Estate Section of the American Bar Association.  She served as the Reporter for three projects of the Uniform Law Commission: the Electronic Wills Drafting Committee, the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act, and the Model Protection of Charitable Assets Act.  She is currently a member of the steering committee of the Intentional Endowments Network and has served as a member of the Advisory Board of the NYU National Center on Philanthropy and the Law.  She has held leadership positions in three sections (trusts and estates, elder law, and nonprofits) of the Association of American Law Schools.

In Oregon, Professor Gary is a member of the Oregon Law Commission and serves as Reporter for its Probate Modernization Work Group.  She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Nonprofit Organizations Law Section of the Oregon State Bar and led a review of Oregon’s nonprofit corporation statutes that resulted in legislation revising the statutes.  She served on the Executive Committee of the Estate Planning Section of the Oregon bar for nine years, including serving as its chair, and served as Editor of the Estate Planning Section’s newsletter for 15 years.  Significant recent articles are “Best Interests in the Long Term: Fiduciary Duties and ESG Investing,” 90 Univ. of Colorado L. Rev. 731 (2019) and “The Oregon Stewardship Trust: A New Type of Purpose Trust that Enables Steward-Ownership of a Business,” 88 Univ. of Cincinnati L. Rev. 707  (f2019). Both are available on SSRN.

For more information, see Prof. Gary’s curriculum vitae.

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