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Common Law, Common Sense: Fiduciary Standards And Trustee Identity, Melanie B. Leslie

Articles

The past twenty years have seen significant changes in the law governing trustees' fiduciary duties. Though fiduciary duty law is a common law creation, recent changes are not a result of common-law evolution, but legislative action. The push to codify trust law, including fiduciary duties, has come from a few sources, including academics, who have argued that trust law should be more uniform, and banking institutions, who have pushed for legislation to ease the burdens of trust management.

In some significant respects, legislative changes to fiduciary duties have not improved upon the common law. In fact, a few important statutes …

Trust Protectors, Agency Costs, And Fiduciary Duty, Stewart E. Sterk

Articles

First used in conjunction with offshore trusts, trust protectors have begun to appear in domestic trusts as well. In part, the protector appears designed to reduce agency cost problems associated with the trust form. But the emergence of trust protectors raises a new set of agency cost problems: first, do protectors owe any enforceable duties to the trust beneficiaries, or to anyone else; second, how, if at all, do the powers conferred on the trust protector affect the responsibilities of the trustee? Current doctrine has not yet answered these questions. And the answers may differ depending on the purposes for …

Clark's Treatise On Corporate Law: Filling Manning's Empty Towers, Ronald J. Gilson, Reinier Kraakman

Faculty Scholarship

Almost 45 years ago, in an elegantly depressive account of the then current state of corporate law scholarship, Bayless Manning announced the death of corporation law "as a field of intellectual effort." Manning left us with an affecting image of a once grand field long past its prime, rigid with formalism and empty of content:

When American law ceased to take the "corporation" seriously, the entire body of law that had been built upon that intellectual construct slowly perforated and rotted away. We have nothing left but our great empty corporate statutes towering skyscrapers of rusted girders, internally welded together …