This Article offers the first general examination of mutual fund capital structure regulation under the Investment Company Act of 1940. Such an examination is long overdue, because American mutual funds collectively hold $12 trillion in assets—about as much as the commercial banking...

This Article offers a broad theory of what distinguishes investment funds from ordinary companies, with ramifications for how these funds are understood and regulated. The central claim is that investment funds (i.e., mutual funds, hedge funds, private equity funds and their cousins) are...

Directed trusts have become a familiar feature of trust practice in spite of considerable legal uncertainty about them. Fortunately, the Uniform Law Commission has just finished work on the Uniform Directed Trust Act (UDTA), a new uniform law that offers clear solutions to the many legal...

This chapter summarizes the four areas of practical innovation of the Uniform Directed Trust Act (UDTA). The first is a careful allocation of fiduciary duties. The UDTA’s basic approach is to take the law of trusteeship and attach it to whichever person holds the powers of trusteeship, even if...

This paper examines how market and political forces interacted to create the American mutual fund industry and its regulation between 1936 and 1942. Contrary to previous scholarly work, this paper argues that the key elements of regulation that now differentiate modern mutual funds from modern...