Article: Sucking Success Out of Minor Social Media Influencers: A Call for Testamentary Capacity Rights in Texas

Symphony Munoz, a law student at Texas Tech School of Law, recently published an article entitled, Sucking Success Out of Minor Social Media Influencers: A Call for Testamentary Capacity Rights in Texas, Estate Planning Journal, Vol. 14. Issue 1, 2022.

Provided below is the abstract to the Article: 

The inability for these minors to create testamentary documents is unfair and inconsistent with other laws that do not prohibit minors from owning property or contracting with these digital asset domains. Furthermore, some states offer minors the limited ability to make important decisions about receiving medical treatment, entering the field of employment, having sex, or getting married. Therefore, the state of Texas should at least allow CVMSMIs the ability to decide where they want their digital assets to go should they die or become incapacitated, especially because digital asset law makes it difficult for heirs to exercise access or control over the accounts of the deceased. This Comment does not call for Texas to completely disregard the legal capacity age requirement. It does, however, call for Texas to rely on whether a qualifying minor has the requisite mental capacity to devise digital assets and the financial value to make it worthwhile, with the traditional safeguards that will continue to protect the interests of a minor (doctrines of undue influence, fraud, and requisite formalities) and the additional safeguards proposed by this Comment.