ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the academic debate on the validity of purpose trusts often reflects contrasting and potentially conflicting conceptions of the nature and social functions of trusts. It argues that judicial tolerance of private purpose trusts in nineteenth century cases depended primarily on the generally very limited scope of what settlors or testators sought to achieve through them. In some cases legal logic seems to have run into a circle of reiterated, conflicting arguments; doctrinal analysis cannot lift itself beyond the impasse. In instances a sociological perspective, concerned to interpret and explain structures of legal doctrine in terms of their social origins and effects, may be able to help to explain why doctrine fails to resolve the dilemmas it seems to provoke, and why legal commentary and criticism run into a stalemate of well-rehearsed, apparently irreconcilable views.
