The Constructive Trust

The Remedial Constructive Trust

Proprietary Remedies in Context

There is a tension in English law between the idea that the courts might provide a remedy by creating new property rights and the understanding that the judiciary's role is limited to the protection of existing proprietary interests with the power to redistribute property residing in the legislature alone. While there are numerous instances in which the courts intervene to readjust property rights,these are disguised in metaphor and fiction. However, this has meant that the law in this area has developed without open consideration of justifications for redistributing property. The result of this is that there is little coherence in the law of proprietary remedies as a whole and a good deal of it is indefensible. The book examines redistributive processes such as tracing, subrogation and proprietary estoppel and the use of the constructive trust in the context of contracts to assign property, vitiated transactions, the profits of wrongdoing and the breakdown of intimate relationships. It contrasts the English treatment of this area of law with developments in other common law jurisdictions where a more dynamic understanding of property has permitted more open acknowledgement of the judicial role in redistributing proprietary rights.

Resulting Trusts

The resulting trust has received little attention in recent years and this may be because, until relatively recently, the law relating to resulting trusts was thought to be settled and uncontroversial. Most of the current academic writing about resulting trusts is found in the established textbooks on equity and trusts, but these tend to provide little more than catalogues of the situations in which resulting trusts arise. There is, however, very little consensus on the principle by which the resulting trust operates, including the fundamental question whether it arises by opertaion of law or depends on the presumed intention to create a trust. This book examines the true nature of the resulting trust and the question whether the trusts brought into being to reverse unjust enrichment should not include resulting trusts. It then considers whether, when resulting trusts are properly understood, it does turn out that it is through the resulting trust that equity makes its principle contribution to reversing unjust enrichment. This book examines principally the case law of the UK, Canada and Australia, and it also makes reference to the views of academic commentators as found in the standard texts and law journals.