ABSTRACT
One of the most common forms of testamentary bequest, the trust reinforces the ideas of a social contract or pact between free individuals and the institutions that make up civil society. A legal form that, like the will, takes its name from the moral imperative it encodes, the trust depends on the writer’s faith in the people on whom he settles his estate, and on the more basic confidence that the law will oversee the administration of his will and disposal of his property in accordance with his own stated intentions. That there may be a discrepancy between what the testator states and what he intends, or between his intention and how the law interprets it, or between the ability of his trustees really to know his mind becomes the central point of contention in Anthony Trollope’s The Warden (1855).
