The trust is a highly popular mode of property-holding and one of the most important innovations in the law of equity. It presents the jurist with numerous conceptual, doctrinal, and ethical challenges. In addition to being used towards the pursuit of good, trusts have also been used for ill, and the interaction of trust law with other laws agitates received principles of justice, efficiency, and coherence in the law. Trust law remains, nevertheless, under-theorized. While its technical an...

The law of Equity, a latecomer to the field of private law theory, raises fundamental questions about the relationships between law and morality, the nature of rights, and the extent to which we are willing to compromise on the rule of law ideal to achieve social goals. In this volume, leading scholars come together to address these and other questions about underlying principles of Equity and its relationship to the common law: What relationships, if any, are there between the legal, phil...

This book sets out to defend the claim that Equity ought to remain a separate body of law; the temptation to iron-out the differences between neighbouring doctrines on the two sides of the Equity/Common Law divide should, in most cases, be resisted. The theoretical part of the book is argues that the characteristics of Equity, namely, appeal to conscience, flexibility, retroactivity and the use of morally-freighted jargon, are essential for the implementation of a legal ideal that has been...