PLDG Seminar: “The Trust: (Still) Equity’s Child” by Professor Irit Samet, King’s College London

On 3 August, the Centre for Legal Theory at NUS Law welcomed Prof Irit Samet to speak at its Private Law Discussion Group (PLDG) seminar.

Prof Samet is a Professor of Law at The Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London, where she also serves as a head of department (private law, IP & digital law). For her lecture, “The Trust: (Still) Equity’s Child”, she examined the three types of account of the lasting existence of equity as a distinctive part of private law: nominalist, formalist, and substantial, specifically, how the trust features in each type of explanation.

Prof Samet argues that trust law can nestle comfortably within a substantive account of equity in which it is interpreted as a tool for injecting ethical standards into market practices by resorting to a specialised notion of conscience. By doing so, she seeks to show both how the trust supports the continued existence of equity as a separate body of law, and how being a member of the equity family sheds light on the way the law of trust has been developed, what it aims to achieve, and, hence, where it needs to go.