ABSTRACT
In this Part of this book we are considering differences in approach from commercial law, equity, the law of property, partnership law and company law. It seems a little counterintuitive that cases decided ultimately by the same members of the House of Lords and Court of Appeal 2 can nevertheless generate different legal rules depending on the question that is put to them. Nevertheless, it is true. As will emerge from the discussion to follow, commercial law has developed different forms of estoppel (at common law) and different forms of rules as to proprietary rights in mixed funds in some contexts. So in this chapter we will see that commercial lawyers have adopted a different approach to title in mixtures of property from that in the law of trusts. An example of this phenomenon is the requirement in the law of trusts that property be segregated for there to be a possibility of asserting proprietary rights over it, 3 which is met by some commercial law cases and statute on the basis that the claimants may be considered to be tenants in common of a mixed fund without the need for identi¿ cation of their segregated share. 4 We will observe a number of contexts in which the approaches of other areas of law to problems long-decided by judges in relation to the law of trusts have taken different and anomalous paths.
