Allison Tait is a professor of law at the University of Richmond where she teaches trusts and estates, family law, estate planning, critical theory, and feminist legal theory. Professor Tait joined the University of Richmond Law faculty in 2015. Before coming to Richmond, she was an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School. She also clerked for the Hon. Richard Palmer of the Connecticut Supreme Court and spent a year as the Gender Equity Postdoctoral Fellow for the Yale Women Faculty Forum.
Professor Tait's research addresses the regulation of family and household economies and the ways in which this regulation produces complex forms of inequality. Her research takes up questions of entitlement and dispossession and she writes about the ways that family wealth rules help to embed difference along the axes of gender, race, and class. She has written articles about the legal framework of high-wealth exceptionalism; the use of family trusts to safeguard social and cultural capital; and role of marriage in the creation of economic privilege. She is currently working on a project that pairs the legal governance of high-wealth families with that of families living in poverty and explicates how these polar economies of excess and extraction replicate colonialist formations.
