Category Archives: Equity and Trusts
Alexander Ressos, ‘Contentious trusts: when legacies divide – The court’s supervisory jurisdiction, the integrity of the trust and the limits of settlor control in cross-border family disputes – English, offshore, Hong Kong, Singapore, Swiss, and Liechtenstein perspectives’
ABSTRACT Across the common-law trust world, settlors entrench family wealth structures with confidentiality clauses, reserved powers, duty-excluding clauses, protector vetoes, no-contest clauses, firewalls and exclusive-jurisdiction clauses. This article argues that none of these devices can oust the court’s irreducible supervisory jurisdiction over the administration of a trust: they merely relocate the dispute to information rights, […]
Lusina Ho, ‘The Nature of the Interest of an Object of Trust or Power’
ABSTRACT This chapter contends that it is overly reductive to characterize the interests of beneficiaries of trusts and objects of powers using singular labels like in rem rights, in personam rights, and ‘rights against rights’. Instead, these parties hold a bespoke bundle of in personam rights and powers, binding trustees and any third parties whose […]
Maria Lucia Passador, ‘AI and Fiduciary Law’
ABSTRACT This chapter examines how artificial intelligence reshapes fiduciary law by technologically mediating the exercise of entrusted discretion. Rather than displacing the traditional foundations of fiduciary obligation – entrustment, vulnerability, discretion, loyalty, and care – AI redistributes the performance of fiduciary functions across complex socio-technical chains involving fiduciaries, institutions, models, developers, providers, data, and beneficiaries. […]
Albert Tan, ‘Final, but Not Yours: Protocol Finality, Private Law and The Allocation of Digital-Asset Loss’
ABSTRACT A system for ordering transactions is not a law of ownership, and the Bitcoin protocol was never meant to be the second thing. It settles the sequence in which transactions are recorded. It does not decide who, as between rival claimants, is entitled to what has moved. The distinction is not a technicality. It […]
Sadie Blanchard, ‘Contracting for Equity’
ABSTRACT Modern contract theory often treats equity as a defect of contract doctrine because it supposedly undermines party intent. Discretionary, ex post scrutiny of contracts is said to frustrate ex-ante planning and reduce contractual value. Theorists point to the hyperformalist contracting practices of particular groups as models to which general contract law should conform. Inaccurate […]
Fong Jun Yi, ‘On Causation and Accounts of Profits: Rukhadze v Recovery Partners GP Ltd’
ABSTRACT In the recent case of Rukhadze v Recovery Partners GP Ltd, the UK Supreme Court was given the opportunity to reconsider the House of Lords’ previous formulations of the account of profits doctrine in Regal (Hastings) Ltd v Gulliver and Boardman v Phipps. It was concluded that the position in Regal and Boardman regarding […]
Martin Edwards, ‘Equity, Private Ordering, and Corporate Law’
ABSTRACT Equity, private ordering, and law are the cornerstones of corporate governance. Courts and scholars regularly hold forth on the interaction between them, drawing the lines separating them ever more finely. According to most scholars and judges, fundamental tensions beset these interactions. Among them: Contractarian theory cannot account for mandatory rules of corporate law. Private […]
Masayuki Tamaruya, ‘Trust Law in Civil Law Asia: Taking Stock’
ABSTRACT Since its reception in civil law Asia in the early twentieth century, trust law in the region has developed certain characteristics that may seem anomalous when compared to the practices in England, the United States, and other common law jurisdictions. However, from both historical and transnational perspectives, these characteristics can be seen as products […]
‘Trusts in Court: The Public’s Right to Know’
Reid Kress Weisbord, David Horton and Naomi Cahn, ‘Secrecy in Trust Litigation’, Wake Forest Law Review (forthcoming, 2026-27), available at SSRN (12 February 2026). I last taught Wills, Estates, and Trusts in Spring 2025 to a large class with a fair number of students who were taking the course because the topic was likely to […]
David Wilde, ‘Informal trusts of land: the end of “valid but unenforceable”’? – National Iranian Oil Co v Crescent Gas Corp Ltd Part 2′
ABSTRACT Ahead of an anticipated appeal hearing before the Supreme Court, this article seeks to establish what now remains of the notion that an informal trust of land, failing to satisfy Law of Property Act 1925, s 53(1)(b), is ‘valid but unenforceable’, following the Court of Appeal’s decision in National Iranian Oil Co v Crescent […]