Canadian law sometimes allows gain-based remedies for certain wrongful acts. There is a strong suggestion that gain-based remedies are available in the common law provinces for torts and perhaps breaches of contract, but the courts have been hesitant. Common law provinces have also been willing...

Will-substitutes are legal techniques that allow the disposition of property on death outside of the deceased's estate. Such techniques, by reducing the assets in the estate, have the potential to harm the interests of creditors of the estate. This paper aims to identify some of the ways in...

In 1944, the House of Lords held that outside of the field of charitable bequests, a testator cannot delegate the power to select who will benefit from his estate. This holding has never been called into question by English appellate courts, and has been followed in many Commonwealth...

Trust drafting practices have changed dramatically in recent decades. A range of considerations has led to an increase in the dispositive discretions held by trustees. In some cases, the trustees' dispositive discretions effectively govern the whole trust structure, leading to what the author...

In this paper, I ask what are the philosophical foundations of Equity as it was defined by Frederic Maitland: the body of rules and principles that were developed over the centuries by the Court of Chancery. My answer is that there is no single purpose, approach, philosophy or norm that...

It has become an orthodoxy in some quarters that fiduciary duties are only proscriptive, forbidding certain actions, and never prescriptive, requiring positive action. I argue that this is a misunderstanding. The argument begins by attempting to explain how this orthodoxy arose, and then by...

This paper explores the ways in which Canadian legal orders address the tension between freedom of testation and the claims of the family of the deceased.The province of Quebec has a civilian law of succession, while the common law governs in the other provinces and in the territories. Under...

The author argues that US law is in danger of undermining its own coherence in the pursuit of competition for trust business with offshore jurisdictions. This has happened partly due to a desire to allow those who create trusts to do whatever they wish. But US law, like other common law systems,...

This text is a chapter in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the New Private Law. It aims to answer the question, “what can the civil law tradition tell us about the New Private Law?” It seeks to do this by offering one civilian’s perspective on private law, on U.S. private law, and on the...

The new Czech Civil Code includes a trust that was inspired in part by the trust of Quebec law. In this paper, I aim to provide a comparative overview of the duties of trustees, looking at their conceptual organization and their strictness, as well as the extent to which such duties are...