The law of commercial trusts has been taught in universities in London and Cambridge, Sydney and Melbourne, Hong Kong and Singapore, but it is absent from the law schools of the United States. This is a puzzle. Commercial trusts have been prominent in U.S. legal and economic history and today...

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'...

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...

This note considers the decision of the Irish High Court in Re Prendiville (1992) which dealt with the enforcement of half-secret trusts. It confirms, in a case where the point arose for decision, that Irish law rejects “the prior acceptance rule” favoured in the English cases. The judgment...

This article reports the results of an empirical study of the effect of the new prudent investor rule on asset allocation by institutional trustees. Using federal banking data spanning 1986 through 1997, the authors find that, after adoption of the new prudent investor rule, institutional...

In this article I make a claim against off shore trusts and foundations as useful estate planning vehicles for Belgian residents. My point is that such structures may end up causing a nightmare both from the perspective of tax law and of civil law.On the fiscal side, the Belgian tax...

The theme of this essay, a commentary on two papers forthcoming in the same volume on “The Worlds of the Trust,” is that trust law is not a species of property law or contract law, but rather is a species of organizational law. Organizational law supplies a set of contractarian rules, some...

Dogs, cats, parrots, and other pet animals play extremely significant roles in the lives of many individuals. People own pets for a variety of reasons – they love animals, they enjoy engaging in physical activity with the animal such as playing ball or going for walks, and they enjoy the...