Philosophical Foundations of the Law of Express Trusts

The trust is a highly popular mode of property-holding and one of the most important innovations in the law of equity. It presents the jurist with numerous conceptual, doctrinal, and ethical challenges. In addition to being used towards the pursuit of good, trusts have also been used for ill, and the interaction of trust law with other laws agitates received principles of justice, efficiency, and coherence in the law. Trust law remains, nevertheless, under-theorized. While its technical and doctrinal aspects have been studied intensively, the foundational questions to which they give rise have remained largely unexamined. This volume takes an important step towards filling this gap. The chapters in this book explore some of these quandaries with a view to initiating and encouraging further engagement and learning. They identify different challenges and adopt a variety of methodological approaches and perspectives towards their resolution, ranging from conceptual questions about what is ‘the trust’ and ‘trusts law’, chapters analysing the legal and/or moral statuses of each of the settlor, trustee, and beneficiary, to chapters questioning the moral foundations of different trusts and range of pursuits towards which parties have deployed them.