Study 183: What Happens to an Object When Its Owner Dies

0:00

-13:51

This study examines what happens to obligations attached to an object when the person who holds it dies, using the two standing American experiments in the question: the will of Isabella Stewart Gardner, which has governed the arrangement of her museum since 1924 and is the reason empty frames still hang after the 1990 theft, and the indenture of Albert C. Barnes, which courts have modified repeatedly since 1951 and which no longer keeps the collection in the building it specified. The difference is not the strength of the intention but the presence of a consequence: Gardner's instrument provi