ABSTRACT
Charities constitute a distinct category from the rest of the law of trusts because charities are public trusts that do not have bene ciaries. Rather, the trustees of charities are obliged to use the charity’s property for a charitable purpose, which in turn, must be for the ‘public bene t’. The bulk of this chapter asks whether or not a variety of purposes will constitute charitable purposes so that they will constitute valid charities. In Chapter 4 we considered how an abstract purpose trust would be void. What emerges from this chapter is that a trust can be created validly to pursue an abstract purpose provided that that purpose is a charitable purpose. Another advantage of charitable trusts is that they are exempt from most forms of taxation – something that arises in many of the cases in which taxpayers have sought to avoid tax by using charities, with the result that much of charities law has been bent out of shape to prevent inappropriate tax avoidance.
