The paper attempts to explain the failure of postcommunist traders exemplified by Balkan traders to make use of arbitration courts by means of the rational choice of forum approach offered by the law and economics movement. Conjectures about traders? behaviour derived by combining this approach...

This article closes a gap in the theory of trust law by supplying a normative account of the use of trusts to avoid and subvert other legal norms. While the use of trusts to subvert other law has been a major function thereof since the middle ages, a fact acknowledged by jurists, doctrinal and...

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...

Bitcoin has long been touted as a currency and a payment system that relies on cryptography and mathematics rather than trust. But is Bitcoin really trustless? And if so, would that be a good thing? This article under-takes a critical deconstruction of Bitcoin and the blockchain, their themes of...

The law of trusts has spent the last twenty years rapidly shedding many traditional requirements, forms and restrictions which imposed liability on negligent trustees, protected vulnerable beneficiaries and prevented the use of trusts to avoid the claims of settlors' and beneficiaries'...

This chapter considers the justification for the 'automatic' resulting trust. It points out that, as a historical matter, the dominant explanation has been that the settler 'retains' any beneficial interest of which he has not disposed. It is suggested, by reference to the “doctrine of the old...

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 article shows that parties to trusts currently enjoy easier access to judicial avoidance of voluntary dispositions resulting from mistakes and inadequate decision-making than other persons. The principal doctrinal basis for this advantage has shifted from the rule in Re Hastings-Bass to...

This is a case study of the Supreme Court's classic decision in Smith v. K.C. Title & Trust Co. A stockholder challenged the constitutionality of the Farm Loan Act of 1916, which authorized federal banks to issue tax-exempt bonds to raise funds for loans to farmers. The case is best known for...

The law as an abstract system of rules establishes the conditions under which people in large societies can live together in peace. This is not because they all have personal trust in each other (which is obviously impossible to establish) but because they trust that living up to the rules is...