ABSTRACT
Studying equity and trust law as an undergraduate can be a profoundly alienating experience. This, we suspect, is because the syllabus tends to concentrate on a relatively limited set of financial and business contexts. For example, the trusts component of such courses often focuses on those areas where what Graham Moffat refers to as the ‘trust’s tricks’ have ‘consistently been used to [a] significant degree’.2 In particular, he lists the use of the trust in the preservation of family wealth, as a medium for collective investment, its role in securing commercial debt, and its use in imposing standards on partners and company directors. Yet ask a lay person what she understands by the words ‘equity’ or ‘trust’ and, rather than a reference to those commercial contexts mentioned above, you will probably get an answer rich with moral intuitions regarding equal access to goods, services and other material benefits in society,3 or the recognition of the expectations of vulnerable members of the community.4
