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The civil justice system has long struggled to resolve disputes over end-of-life transfers. The two most common grounds for challenging the validity of a gift, will, or trust— mental incapacity and undue influence—are vague, hinge on the state of mind of a dead person, and allow factfinders to substitute their own norms and preferences for the donor's intent. In addition, the slayer doctrine—which prohibits killers from inheriting from their victims—has generated decades of constitutional challenges. But recently, these controversial rules have migrated into an area where the stakes are significantly higher: the criminal justice system. For example, states have criminalized financial exploitation of an elder, which includes obtaining assets through undue influence. Likewise, prosecutors are bringing theft charges against people who accept transfers from mentally diminished owners. Finally, legislatures are experimenting with abuser statutes that extend the slayer doctrine by barring anyone from receiving property from the estate of a senior citizen whom they mistreated. This Article evaluates the benefits and costs of this trend. It explains that these new sanctions deter elder abuse: wrongdoing that is rampant, pernicious, and underreported. Nevertheless, this Article exposes the dangers of criminalizing this unique area of law. First, criminal undue influence and the abuser doctrine may be unconstitutional in some situations. Second, inheritance crimes suffer from the flaws that make probate litigation so unreliable. Third, because inheritance law and criminal law have been traditionally understood as distinct, jurisdictions have not yet figured out how to gracefully merge them. Finally, this Article builds on these insights to argue that states should abolish criminal undue influence, harmonize civil and criminal rules, and create exceptions to abuser laws.

B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), the radical Indian anti-caste thinker, left unfinished a critical corpus of works on "Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India", a fragment of which was provisionally titled "Essays on the Bhagavad Gita". This essay engages with that corpus, situating Ambedkar's encounter with the Gita within a much broader twentieth-century political and philosophical concern with the question of tradition and violence. It interrogates the excessive and heterogeneous conceptual impulses that mediate Ambedkar's attempt to retrieve a counterhistory of Indian antiquity. Located as it is in the same Indic neighborhood from which a radical counterhistory of touchability might emerge, the Gita is a particularly fraternal and troubling text for Ambedkar. Yet his responsibility towards the Gita comes to be hinged not upon evasion but rather upon an exaggeration of its hermeneutic power; that is, upon his painstaking inflation of the Gita's willfully modern interest in instituting the universal. Ambedkar's relentless struggle to annihilate this universality of the Gita would have to be founded upon another universality, at once destructive, excessive and counterlegislative. In this unfinished attempt to recuperate the ideality of the universal, this essay asks, does Ambedkar himself become the most thorough modern practitioner of the Gita?