Faculty Profile: Amy Morris Hess

Professor Hess specializes in trusts and estates, property, and taxation. Before beginning her teaching career in 1980, she practiced law in New York City and Charlottesville, Virginia, concentrating her practice in estate planning and administration. Since 1994, she has been the successor author of the leading treatise in the trust and estates law: Bogert, Trusts and Trustees. Her articles on federal taxation have appeared in the Tennessee Law Review, the Real Property, Probate and Trust Journal, and the Tax Lawyer. She also is the co-author of a casebook on the law of trusts and estates.

For several years, Hess has been researching attitudes toward estate planning among the baby boomer generation. She has presented the results of her research at seminars in Destin, Florida (October 2007); Knoxville, Tennessee (January 2008); Colorado Springs, Colorado (March 2009); and at the Southern Regional Meeting of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel in Mobile, Alabama (April 2012) under the title “Estate Planning for the Baby Boomers: Will They Have Estates to Plan?.” In September 2008, she presented some of this research as a panelist in a presentation entitled “What a Difference a Generation Makes: Estate Planning for Generations X, Y, and Beyond” at the Joint Fall Continuing Legal Education Symposium of the American Bar Association Sections of Taxation and Real Property, Trust & Estate Law in San Francisco, CA. A portion of that presentation was published as the lead article in the ABA Tax Section Quarterly (Winter 2009).

Professor Hess was associate editor of the Real Property, Probate and Trust Journal from 1990 until 1997 and editor from 1997 to 2001. In 2005, she received the Treat Award for Excellence from the National College of Probate Judges for her many contributions to the development of probate and trust law. She is an academic fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel.  She is currently serving as the American Bar Association Advisor to a committee of the Uniform Laws Commission charged with drafting a uniform powers of appointment act.  In addition to her academic activities, Professor Hess consults and acts as an expert witness on matters involving estates and trusts law.

Professor Hess has been honored with the Bass, Berry & Sims Award for Service to the Bench and Bar twice, the Harold C. Warner Outstanding Teacher Award twice, the UTK National Alumni Outstanding Teacher Award, and the Carden Award for Outstanding Achievement in Scholarship. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, the University of Texas, the University of South Carolina, and the University of Alabama, and an associate professor at the University of Colorado. From 2010 to 2012, Professor Hess taught Estate Planning in the distance education LLM in Taxation program at the University of Alabama.