The International Academy of Estate and Trust Laws (IAETL) meets each May to spend a week of intensive engagement with issues of direct and immediate concern to estate and trusts lawyers. More than merely an assembly of commentators and interpreters, the IAETL is a prestigious body that affects real change in courts, law reform commissions, and governmental agencies. Its membership?including solicitors, barristers, notaires, judges, and scholars, all experts in trusts, estates, and inheritance law, and/or tax law?highlight the contrasts and comparisons between the pertinent laws of civil and common law jurisdictions.

This volume records the May 2002 conference in Rome, which featured four distinct areas of discussion and debate:

how trusts in the civilian context (specifically Italy) are subjected to taxation; the delicate balance between inter vivos and postmortem taxation; a lively debate on the nature and rationale of the inheritance tax; and how best to serve the client at the same time as meeting one?s ethical obligations.

As always, this outstanding annual (the fourth in this series published by Kluwer Law International) continues to offer perspectives that open on ideas in themselves, apart from the demands and responsibilities of knowing and applying the law in busy demanding professional and scholarly environments. For this reason especially it is sure to engage the deep interest of researchers, academics, practitioners, law reform bodies, governmental groups and their advisers working in this complex and varied field of law.