About the program
Whether you are a financial advisor, CPA, insurance broker, attorney, trust officer, or a planned giving professional, odds are you’ve had a community property issue cross your desk. This program, featuring Professor Jamie Ratner, who will offer community property law substance, and a multidisciplinary panel of professionals, who will apply real-life scenarios to the session’s content, aims to inform and engage all levels of professionals who serve married/soon-to-be-divorced/divorced/widowed clients and their property.
Education will include:
- A primer on community property law that all professionals can understand.
- Instruction on characterizing community and separate property and liabilities.
- Explanation of legal presumptions concerning community and separate property, the various scenarios that trigger the presumptions, and how these presumptions can be overcome.
- Discussion concerning agreements that change the character of the community and separate property.
- Emphasis on the importance (or not) of asset titles and deeds.
We are soliciting questions from attendees through May 31, which may be incorporated into the content and or panel discussions. Please be specific and remember not to share client information. E-mail questions to admin@saepc.org.
This program is free to current SAEPC members and new members who join the Council for the 2024-2025 season. Non-members are welcome to attend for a $75 registration fee.
About the Speaker
Prof. Jamie Ratner, Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Arizona College of Law, has taught marital property courses (as well as antitrust, contracts, administrative law, and law and economics courses) for “too many years.” In 1980 he received his JD from the University of California Berkeley Law School and an MA in economics from, Berkeley the University of California, Berkeley Economics Department as part of Berkeley’s then nascent law and economics concurrent degree program. Prior to teaching at Arizona, Prof. Ratner was for 5 years a prosecutor at the Antitrust Division of the United States Dept. of Justice in Washington D.C. His research is typically interdisciplinary, encompassing several different areas of law as well as disciplines such as economics and psychology. His marital property publications include an analysis of joint tenancy with right of survivorship property held by married couples in community property jurisdictions, an analysis of child support and other premarital debts in community property jurisdictions, an analysis of the nature of creditor and debtor windfalls resulting from divorce in community property jurisdictions, and analysis of “equitable” vs. “equal” distributions of community property at divorce and death. Prof. Ratner has also authored a case book for his Arizona-based community property course which, consistent with his antitrust background and his loathing of the uncompetitive overpricing of law school course casebooks, he provides without charge to his students in hard copy as well as by posting it in digital form on his course web site.