Wendy, a very successful celebrity chef and media personality, died last month. Her Will contains the following dispositions:
- a) The income of 10,000 shares in East End Widgets Ltd to be held on trust for the surviving members of my old school rowing team;
- b) My house is to be set aside, for as long as the law allows, as a place of respite for exhausted Michelin-starred chefs and their respective employees;
- c) My trustees may use some of my residuary estate to assist my closest friends and my relatives with their daily living expenses, if they should happen to fall on hard times;
- d) The remainder of my estate shall be distributed as my trustees shall think fit in their absolute discretion among the current students of Midway University who have the strongest proposals for reversing climate change, in the opinion of the Chief Executive of ‘Climate Alarm’.
Assess the validity of each of these dispositions. Wendy’s estate includes 25,000 shares in East End Widgets Ltd; £5 million in her bank account; and a large house in Kensington. She was a member of several rowing teams at Mile End High School in the early 1980s; attended Midway University in the 1990s; and an active member of ‘Climate Alarm’, a privately run environmental Non-Governmental Organisation based in London. Students are advised to discount the possibility that any of the dispositions could be considered charitable in nature.
