Penner & Purves

Penner & Purves Our Law Firm provides solutions in Estate Planning, Trust Administration, Family Law, and Probate.

If you are the parent of a newborn and you reside in the State of California, then you meet the conditions for our $1,50...
07/23/2026

If you are the parent of a newborn and you reside in the State of California, then you meet the conditions for our $1,500 discount on any of our flat fee estate plan packages.

Do you have a newborn? Do you live in the State of California? If s...

“Things are ordered because they have intelligible natures or essences. The primary question ‘What is it?’ has real answ...
07/01/2026

“Things are ordered because they have intelligible natures or essences. The primary question ‘What is it?’ has real answers. Reality is intelligible to mind. Being is open to reason and reason is open to being.”
― Peter Kreeft

Tiffany Gauthier, soon-to-be associate attorney at Penner & Purves,...

There is this theory that we are moving (have moved) away from the economic system of capitalism, which has property own...
06/30/2026

There is this theory that we are moving (have moved) away from the economic system of capitalism, which has property ownership as its foundation ...
.. and that we are arriving (or have already arrived) in a new technological version of feudalism (call it technofeudalism) where the economic system’s foundation is the paying of rents with little to no meaningful property ownership.

However, in Medieval feudalism, the laws, customs, manners of the culture dictated that the lord or property owner had inherited (and was raised to follow) a whole series of serious obligations and responsibilities (even if not always followed) towards the serfs in protecting them, caring for them, and promoting the common good in exchange for their rents and labor.

By contrast, if we are moving into a technofeudalist economic system, the problem is that our new tech overlords to whom we give our labor, our time, and our rents have to deal with virtually no laws, no customs, and no manners that require any obligation or responsibility towards us.

The ways in which they developed social media platforms demonstrated this clearly.

The ways in which they developed the smart phone proved this as well.

The ways in which they are building AI and data centers appears to be ramping up to demonstrate all of this even more emphatically than before.

Part of this is something we’ve seen before in history; part of this is entirely new. The law is nowhere close to catching up with it, and there is a great deal of work to be done.

Frances Mullen, paralegal at Penner & Purves, quotes Antón Barba-Ka...

If you truly care about your children’s formation, education, and flourishing (and, as a parent, how can you not?), then...
06/29/2026

If you truly care about your children’s formation, education, and flourishing (and, as a parent, how can you not?), then you have the choice either to be intentional about it or to leave it to chance and the caprices of powers that are other than yourself and family.

Assuming you are intentional about it, then Virtue Ethics is for you. Your family, after all, is the smallest level of the local polis in which meaning, belonging, and liberty are to be found. Life is lived within a framework of relationships, practices, and habits which determine how you live.

One of our greatest estate planning / wealth building / family dynasty advocates, James E. Hughes Jr. agrees.

See Aristotle, Cincinnatus, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, John Adams, George Washington, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Alasdair MacIntyre.

Jaime Purves, wife of J.A.A. Purves, quotes James E. Hughes Jr. “...

“A sober reflection on the history of the ancient republics might put us on our guard against many of the dangers to whi...
06/26/2026

“A sober reflection on the history of the ancient republics might put us on our guard against many of the dangers to which we ourselves are exposed.”

Stop, pause a beat, and then reread that again.

“A sober reflection on the history of the ancient republics might put us on our guard against many of the dangers to which we ourselves are exposed.”

If you don’t know anything about the history of past republics, then it’s high time you learned. Skip the wikinotes and Wikipedia and the AI; you won’t learn that way.

Go directly to Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Lucius Cassius Dio, Josephus, Sallust, Diodorus, Livy, Tacitus, Claudius, Plutarch, Suetonius, Appian, Arrian, et al. and start reading.

Patrick Najera, video production specialist at Penner & Purves, quo...

Since posting our very first video two years ago on June 25, 2024, our law firm’s two-year-old video channel now has: 30...
06/25/2026

Since posting our very first video two years ago on June 25, 2024, our law firm’s two-year-old video channel now has:

304 videos

12,782 subscribers

118,743 views

We currently have no frame of reference to know how fast or slow, good or bad that is. If we were to guess, we would guess that it means neither.

Instead, what does matter is whether we can build a video channel that provides value and that isn’t just autogenerating content that copies everybody else.

On this question of not just copying everybody else, we’d guess that we are succeeding — an appropriate thought for today’s Marshall McLuhan quote.

Interestingly enough, did you know that the wealthy often live stress-filled, hyper-busy lives running the rat race and spending tons of energy to model the corporation’s ideal peak of income earning and consumerism? That doesn’t sound like a good life to us. It should be possible to live life another way.

Paul Blewett, senior associate attorney at Penner & Purves, quotes ...

Alasdair MacIntyre argues that we live in an age of “moral pluralism” where we have mistakenly applied the idea of consu...
06/24/2026

Alasdair MacIntyre argues that we live in an age of “moral pluralism” where we have mistakenly applied the idea of consumerism to rational thought, picking and choosing philosophical principles as if they were commodities.

Our culture encourages us to be detached from the ordered intellectual traditions of the past in order to follow the dictates of our own individual wills. This results in “an unharmonious melange of ill-assorted fragments” where the “various concepts which inform our moral discourse were originally at home” in rationally coherent theories and practices which fit together and “enjoyed a role and function supplied by contexts of which they have now been deprived.”

The result is that today’s atomized individual, whether by choice or random happenstance, collects an incompatible and contradictory assortment of concepts and assumptions. These assumptions detached from any coherent context do not fit together. Indeed, they were never meant to. Thoughtlessly holding to such a mismatched collection of assumptions ends only in schizophrenic intellect.

Sidenote for those who think AI can help them write: Aggregating all of this into probalistically autogenerated “text” spit out in sequence by a word predictor machine does not produce reasoned discourse.

Stephen E. Penner, attorney at Penner & Purves, quotes Brad S. Greg...

We’d wonder what would happen if you applied the sentiment behind “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” into your esta...
06/22/2026

We’d wonder what would happen if you applied the sentiment behind “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” into your estate planning for your family?

Because it’s more than sentiment, isn’t it?

It also has to do with being caught by surprise by your death, something that will certainly happen to any of us who are not ready.

And, speaking of being ready, it also asks us to think about what is truly lasting versus what isn’t — a principle that should affect what we build and how we spend our time.

We shouldn’t ignore this; nor should we keep putting it off.

Patrick Najera, video production specialist at Penner & Purves, quo...

It doesn’t matter what economic demographic you are in. You have a choice.You can do your charitable giving (or tithing)...
06/19/2026

It doesn’t matter what economic demographic you are in. You have a choice.

You can do your charitable giving (or tithing) without any planned strategy.

Or ... you can do your charitable giving (or tithing) with a planned strategy.

Reasonable persons can estimate which of these two options will have more effective results versus just leaving things to chance.

Book a free charitable giving consultation now by texting (805) 965...

Our reason for hope very much lies in the younger generations.As the younger generations return to first principles, ori...
06/16/2026

Our reason for hope very much lies in the younger generations.

As the younger generations return to first principles, origins, and tradition, let’s not be the ones holding them back.

As the younger generations begin their work of institution rebuilding and restoration, let’s not be the generation who resists that work of restoration

There really isn’t any good reason for Baby Boomers or for Generation X to be some sort of weird, inverted, rebels who are against inheritance and simultaneously against both our grandparents and against our grandchildren.

Emily Takaki, legal assistant at Penner & Purves, quotes Barack Oba...

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