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, estate and gift tax, nonprofit organizations, and
an undergraduate course on law and families. In 2025, she taught Law and
Wealth Management as a visiting professor at the University of Hong
Kong. She has written and spoken about the regulation of charities, fiduciary
duties including the prudent investor standard, stewardship trusts and purpose
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 and 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
Uniform Electronic Wills Act, the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional
Funds Act, and the Model Protection of Charitable Assets Act. She was a
member of the steering committee of the Intentional Endowments Network
and continues to serve on its Fiduciary Investment Committee. She has
served on the Advisory Board of the NYU National Center on Philanthropy
and the Law and has held leadership positions in three sections (trusts and
estates, elder law, and nonprofits) of the Association of American Law
Schools. She is currently leading a Lawyers Workgroup as part of the Purpose
Trust Ownership Network.

In Oregon, Professor helped draft Oregon’s stewardship trust statute. She
was a member of the Oregon Law Commission, served as Reporter for its
Probate Modernization Work Group, and currently serves as Reporter for its
Partition of Heirs Property Workgroup. As a member of the Executive
Committee of the Nonprofit Organizations Law Section of the Oregon State
Bar she 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 “The Changing
Landscape of Business Succession: How and Why Purpose Trusts Matter,”
18 Ohio State Bus. L. J. 41 (2024), “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).
They are available on
SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=557612.