Description

The lecture is based on work done in collaboration with Jessica Hudson. We agree with Kit Barker and Tim Liau that private law has standing rules which empower some parties and forbid others to bring proceedings, that the content of these rules can vary from one type of case to another, and that the justifications for the rules can also vary. Focussing on proceedings where the rules governing exercises of trustee power are engaged, we observe that in many common law jurisdictions it is often said that beneficiaries have exclusive standing to bring such proceedings. However, legislation and caselaw provide that standing to enforce trustee duties can be allocated to a much wider range of parties to bring trust proceedings than is commonly believed.

Three arguments follow. First, the standing rules established by the authorities are inconsistent with the ‘beneficiary principle’ which holds that trusts without beneficiaries are generally void because without beneficiaries there can be no one with a power to enforce the trustees’ duties. Second, the standing rules are hard to reconcile with the view that the duties owed by trustees are ‘directed’, meaning they correlate with claim-rights held by other parties, and more specifically, beneficiaries; and they are easier to reconcile with the view that trustee duties are ‘undirected’, meaning no one has correlative claim-rights against the trustees although various people may have enforcement powers against them. Third, if one believes that beneficiaries have exclusive standing to enforce trustee duties which correlate to rights held by the beneficiaries then a possible justification for this rule is that standing powers are allocated to right-holders as a means of vindicating their rights. But on our view of the law, a different justification for trust law’s standing rules must be found and we suggest it lies in the fact that standing to enforce trustee duties is generally allocated by the trust parties whose choices are given legal effect as a means of supporting their self-actualisation.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Charles Mitchell has been a Professor of Law at UCL since 2010. In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and in 2019 he was appointed an Honorary QC (now KC). He has held visiting posts at the University of Hong Kong and the University of New South Wales. His primary research interests are equity and trusts, unjust enrichment, and modern legal history. He has co-authored several editions of Goff and Jones on Unjust Enrichment, Underhill and Hayton: Law Relating to Trusts and Trustees, and Hayton, McFarlane and Mitchell on Equity and Trusts. He has co-edited many essay collections, including Constructive and Resulting Trusts (2010), Landmark Cases in Equity (2012), Current Issues in Succession Law (2016), Pensions: Law, Policy and Practice (2020) and Essays on the History of Equity (2026).