Robert H. Sitkoff, the Austin Wakeman Scott Professor of Law and the John L. Gray Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, has been reappointed by Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey to serve as a Uniform Law Commissioner for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, continuing nearly two decades of national leadership in modernizing trusts and estates law.
The reappointment comes alongside a significant milestone for Sitkoff and the Uniform Law Commission (ULC): the commission’s approval this summer of the Uniform Conflict of Laws in Trusts and Estates Act, a model statute that Sitkoff chaired over five years of drafting and deliberation. The act is now recommended for enactment by state legislatures across the country.
“I am grateful to Governor Healey for the opportunity to keep representing Massachusetts while putting scholarship to work in the practical business of improving the law. Consider estate planning today, which routinely crosses state lines. But the rules courts use to decide which state’s law governs a trust or an estate were built for an era when the family, the property, and the probate court were all in one place. The new uniform act updates those rules for the way people now hold and transfer wealth,” Sitkoff said.
Appointed in 2021 to lead the drafting committee, Sitkoff guided commissioners, judges, practitioners, academics, and advisers in developing the act to address increasingly complex choice-of-law questions arising in modern trusts and estates practice. Sitkoff had earlier explored those questions, and the changes in contemporary trusts and estates practice that caused them, in a scholarly article on “The Twenty-First Century Revolution in Conflict of Trust Laws.”
Within the ULC, Sitkoff has long served as a liaison member of the Joint Editorial Board for Uniform Trusts and Estates Acts, and he has served on the drafting committees responsible for several influential uniform acts in the trusts and estates field, including chairing the Uniform Directed Trust Act (2017). Sitkoff has also published a scholarly article on “Textualism and Uniform Acts.”
Sitkoff is also heavily involved with the American Law Institute, for which he is a member of the Council, the Institute’s Board of Directors. He has served on the advisory panel or consultative group for the Restatement (Third) of Trusts, the Restatement (Third) of Property: Wills and Other Donative Transfers, the Restatement of Charitable Nonprofits, and the Restatement (Third) of Conflicts of Law.
Sitkoff was recently inducted into the Estate Planning Hall of Fame sponsored by the National Association of Estate Planners & Councils. He is also a past chair of the Section on Trusts and Estates of the Association of American Law Schools, an academic fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel, and an academician of the International Academy of Estate and Trust Law.
An internationally recognized authority on trusts, estates, and fiduciary administration, Sitkoff is the surviving author of “Wills, Trusts, and Estates” (Aspen 12th ed. 2026), the leading casebook in the field, and he is a coeditor of “The Oxford Handbook of Fiduciary Law” (Oxford University Press 2019). He also edits the Wills, Trusts, and Estates abstracting journal in the Social Science Research Network.
In a recent Last Lecture at Harvard Law School, Sitkoff argued that private law is essential to the rule of law and emphasized that lawyers have a professional obligation not only to serve clients but also to improve the law itself. Speaking about organizations such as the Uniform Law Commission, he observed that meaningful law reform depends on participation by “the learned profession” because “without the learned profession doing law reform, I think it’s a hopelessly naive understanding of the political structure.”
The Uniform Law Commission, founded in 1892, drafts nonpartisan model legislation for adoption by the states. Among its most influential accomplishments are the Uniform Commercial Code, the Uniform Probate Code, and the Uniform Trust Code. Massachusetts is a founding member of the commission, and Sitkoff has represented the Commonwealth continuously since his original gubernatorial appointment in 2008.
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