ABSTRACT
Against the vast majority of post-1900s jurisprudence and academic literature, this dissertation argues that the presumptive or ‘presumed’ resulting trust is a type of constructive trust retrospectively created by judges in cases where the transferor is presumed, inferred, or evidenced to have intended to ‘retain the beneficial interest’ in the conveyed property or, in other words, to have ‘intended for the transferee to take as a mere trustee’, yet has declared no express trust to actually retain the beneficial interest. In avoiding the injustice of effecting the conveyance against the transferor’s intention – that intention standing unrebutted – the resulting trust is necessitated and thus created for the transferor in court so as to result the beneficial interest back to the transferor. This position, contrary to the varying positions of Mee, Chambers, and Swadling, is shown, through this dissertation’s doctrinal exposition, as the best-supported position with reference to authoritative textbooks from the 1400s through to the 1600s and judgments from those periods through to the 1800s and early 1900s, the residual period (1960s-2000s) being used to contextualise the orthodoxy of the former. The literary and doctrinal authorities are dealt with chronologically in order to arrest bias, their internal nuances and external historical contexts too being paid great attention. In the round, this dissertation, through careful reference to historical evidence, attempts to provide a thorough exposition so as to produce a definitive, complete definition of the presumptive resulting trust.
Vodenitcharov, Daniel S, The Resulting Trust: An Exposition of Intention and Function (April 29, 2026).
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