Category Archives: Equity and Trusts
Orts and Schafhäutle, ‘Corporate Fiduciary Duties and the Climate and Biodiversity Crisis’
ABSTRACT This Article argues that addressing one of the most urgent environmental challenges facing humanity today – the global climate and biodiversity crisis – calls for a transformation at the heart of corporate law: its fiduciary duties. After demonstrating how current corporate fiduciary duties are implicated in this crisis, we argue for reform of fiduciary […]
Hiroyuki Watanabe, ‘The Fundamental Theory of Japanese Trust Law: The Legal Structure of Civil Law Trusts’
ABSTRACT In common law trusts, the trustee holds ‘legal title’ and the beneficiary holds a ‘beneficial interest’. This legal structure has traditionally been considered unique to common law, resulting from the ‘separation of common law and equity’. However, recent foundational theoretical research has clarified that the beneficiary’s ‘beneficial interest’ does not compete with the trustee’s […]
Yuxin Zhao, ‘Data Charitable Trusts: Balancing Privacy and Sharing Value in Healthcare Data Governance’
ABSTRACT Healthcare data-sharing faces a governance problem as current frameworks struggle to balance privacy protection with research access needs. The gap between data accumulation and utilization constrains public health advancement. Charitable trusts offer a legal framework that achieves a balance between data protection and the needs of research, thereby addressing some limitations of existing data-sharing […]
Lipson and Evans, ‘Contractualizing Corporate Governance’
ABSTRACT The relationship between fiduciary duty and contract has never been clear. The law of fiduciaries has long constrained discretionary control of other people’s property, notably in corporate governance, where directors owe a corporation duties of care and loyalty. Yet, contract has also had the capacity to modify these duties in important – but uncertain […]
Luís Carlos Calderón Gómez, ‘Charity’s Limits’
ABSTRACT Charity law’s most pressing contemporary problems are almost uniformly diagnosed by policymakers and scholars as isolated, doctrinal issues. This Article argues that this consensus is mistaken. Seemingly disparate developments – the increasing commercialization and hybridization of tax-exempt organizations, and renewed governmental efforts to revoke charitable tax exemption for violations of ‘public policy’ – reflect […]
‘Interim injunctions and proprietary estoppel claims: Preston v Preston’
BACKGROUND The judgment in the recent Northern Irish case of Preston v Preston ([2026] NI Ch 3) is a useful example of how proprietary estoppel operates at the interlocutory stage. The background is a family dispute. Andrew Preston is one of twenty nephews and nieces of William Preston. Under William’s will he is just one […]
Lusina Ho, ‘The Proprietary Consequences of Rescission in Equity’
ABSTRACT This chapter addresses the doctrinal uncertainty in English law regarding the proprietary consequences of equitable rescission for transfers made under impaired consent. The central claim of the chapter is that equity grants transferors rights of increasing proprietary intensity to protect disputed assets from dissipation during the prolonged process of obtaining an order for rescission. […]
Trust and Trusts in Commercial Law: University of Western Australia Law School, 3-4 December 2026
The aims of the conference are to provide academics with an informal and supportive environment in which to present work in progress, and to facilitate a collegial discussion of issues related to teaching and publishing in private and commercial law. We encourage early and mid-career academics and research higher degree students to consider presenting on […]
Dan Harris, ‘Israel, Defence Stocks and Divestments: Equity’s Intervention when LGPS Fiduciaries Play at Geopolitics’
ABSTRACT The Local Government Pension Scheme (‘LGPS’) is typically administered by local authorities. Somewhat incongruously with its localised nature, or even recent pooling measures, there are attempts by those campaigning for boycott, divestment and sanctions (‘BDS’) against the State of Israel to extend the reach of the town hall into the geopolitical arena. The decision […]
Hudson and Mitchell, ‘Standing in trusts law, the beneficiary principle and the juridical nature of trustee duties’
INTRODUCTION Private law theory is dominated by questions about duties owed to parties with correlative rights and the remedies that secure performance or respond to breach. Private law theorists rarely consider rules of standing that confer liberties not to refrain from bringing or defending proceedings and powers to bring and defend them. Yet parties with […]