ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the decided cases dealing with resulting trusts and attempts to categorise those decisions. It examines the competing academic and judicial explanations of the underlying rationales of resulting trusts which veer broadly between one view asserting a broadly restitutionary role for resulting trusts and another which seeks to limit the resulting trust to those few categories set out in the decided cases. The two more usual presumptions are in the cases of transfer from father to child and from husband to wife. The first applicable category of presumption is where one party makes a gift voluntarily. The position in English law relating to recovery on grounds of mistake has been greatly expanded by the decision of the House of Lords in Kleinwort Benson v Lincoln. Where a trust fails for any reason the equitable interests purportedly allocated by the failed trust must pass to someone, on the basis that equity abhors a vacuum in the equitable ownership.
