The Inferred Trust: an Unhappy Marriage of Contract and Trust?

Speaker: Professor Emeritus Michael Bryan (Melbourne School of Law)
Chair: Lord Justice Beatson, Courts and Tribunals Judiciary
Admission: Free
Accreditation: This event is accredited with 1 CPD hour with the SRA and BSB
Series: Current Legal Problems 2015-2016

About the lecture

It is now accepted that the principles applicable to the construction of contracts also apply to the construction of trust instruments: Re Sigma Finance Corporation [2009] UKSC 2. The principles are relevant not only to the construction of trust instruments but also to the process of inferring a trust from a commercial contract.

This lecture sceptically examines the “what goes for contract law also goes for trust law” approach to inferring trusts from contracts in the light of recent developments in the techniques for construing contracts.

It will be argued that the principles for declaring a valid trust are distinct from the methodologies applied to construe contracts, and that some recent decisions have conflated contract and trust principles in determining whether a trust can be inferred from a contract. Examples include cases where a trust has been inferred from a contract containing a clause prohibiting the assignment of the benefit of the contract.

About the speaker

Michael Bryan is an Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne, having previously lectured at Queen Mary College, University of London.

He has written extensively on equity and trusts law, and is currently an editor of Ford and Lee’s ‘Principles of the Law of Trusts’, a leading Australian practitioner text.

About Current Legal Problems

The Current Legal Problems annual lecture series was established over sixty years ago.  The lectures are public, delivered on a weekly basis and chaired by members of the judiciary.

The Current Legal Problems (CLP) annual volume is published on behalf of UCL Laws be Oxford University Press, and features scholarly articles that offer a critical analysis of important current legal issues.

It covers all areas of legal scholarship and features a wide range of methodological approaches to law. With its emphasis on contemporary developments, CLP is a major point of reference for legal scholarship.

Find out more about CLP on the Oxford University Press website