Inaugural Lecture - Professor Adam Hofri-Winogradow: Should Trusts be Legal Persons?

Event Description

Trusts are relationships, not legal persons, for trusts law purposes. Still, they are often treated as if they were legal persons, both for private law purposes and other purposes, including tax and standing. Some trusts are in practice structured so as to emulate corporations, as in the appointment of a board and a CEO. Some specialized trust regimes are explicitly designed as legal persons. Faced with this reality, Lionel Smith reminded us that treating trusts as legal persons is a mistake. I take a different approach: I examine whether the law of trusts should be redesigned so as to make them legal persons. I find that on balance, a careful, informed entification of express trusts could be desirable. Entifying the trust would reduce the costs associated with trustee succession by having the trust assets vested in an entified trust rather than in any trustee. It would also provide a familiar resolution regime for cases where trustee indebtedness in the trust context outruns the assets available to defray it: entified trusts could easily be subjected to the law of bankruptcy. Finally, trust entification would prevent the absurdity, common given trusts-as-relationships, of trustees holding a chose in action against themselves on trust, with the same person being both debtor and creditor. The entified trust would be the creditor, and the trustee the debtor.

5:30pm-6:30pm - Lecture
6:30pm-7:30pm - Reception

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Speaker

Adam Hofri’s research and teaching have long focused on trusts, including comparative doctrinal treatments of trust law topics, empirical studies of the ways trusts are used in practice by different sorts of clients, studies of many jurisdictions' recent dramatic reforms to their law of trusts, looking to make that law alternately client- and practitioner-friendly, historical and socio-legal accounts of the development of trust law and practice, and theoretical accounts of the social and economic functions trusts fulfil, including as a tool for subverting other parts of the law. 

Adam's research has been quoted and relied on by social justice organizations such as the Tax Justice Network and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. It has also been quoted and relied on in the global media, including the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, the Irish Times, and El Pais. Adam's teaching has focused on trusts, corporations and comparative law; he has also been a patient scholar of tax, with an emphasis on trusts taxation. A winner of several grants including two SSHRC grants, Adam has delivered talks at the EU Parliament, the Danish Parliament, and to senior administrators of Scandinavian tax authorities.