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...

Trusts emerge regularly in relationship property disputes and they are generally well understood to take priority whenever there is a competition between the trust and a claim that the trust property otherwise falls within the pool of relationship assets available for division. Nevertheless,...

This article considers the interface between personal rights and proprietary rights. It critically examines a number of cases and academic writings that consider whether a mistaken payment should result in a personal right of recovery only (ie ability to sue the recipient) or justify the court...

This paper considers the successful application for judicial review in Great Christchurch Buildings Trust v Church Property Trustees and the worrying effects of this decision upon New Zealand law. The paper concludes that, in holding that sufficient public interest will justify circumvention of...

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...

The requirement of object certainty in express trusts underwent significant reform in the heady days of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This article argues that those changes have had important implications not only for the theoretical conception of the trust, but also for the modern practice of...

What does the law presume when it is proven simply that one person has made a payment of money to another? Surprisingly, there are three candidate answers to this question. First, a number of nineteenth-century authorities hold that ‘when money is paid by one man to another the legal...

The problem of the beneficial ownership of the family home has troubled courts throughout the common law world. It has proved extremely difficult "to unravel the tangled skein of human association, and apply to it considerations of legal principle." The Irish courts have had an unusually rich...

This essay discusses the concept of loyalty in fiduciary law. It contrasts fiduciary loyalty with moral conceptions of loyalty, and argues that the distinctiveness of fiduciary loyalty is best appreciated in light of characteristic features of fiduciary relationships. The essay establishes the...