The Secret Life of the Trust: The Trust as an Instrument of Commerce

Abstract

In the culture of Anglo-American law, we think of the trust as a branch of the law of gratuitous transfers. That is where we teach trusts in the law school curriculum, that is where we locate trusts in the statute books,- and that is where American lawyers typically encounter the trust in their practice. The trust originated at the end of the Middle Ages as a means of transferring wealth within the family, and the trust remains our characteristic device for organizing intergenerational wealth transmission when the transferor has substantial assets or complex family affairs. In the succinct formulation of Bernard Rudden, Anglo-American lawyers regard the trust as "essentially a gift, projected on the plane of time and so subjected to a management regime."

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 112 citations exist upstream.