ABSTRACT
It has been said that certainty is the principal virtue of every legal system (Oakley, 1997) but it is also true that chaos and complexity are the common characteristics of every problem that confronts a legal system. That is the tension at the centre of this book. While the law seeks to impose certainty, litigants bring only confusion. Traditionally equity and the law of trusts have been concerned with providing justice to balance out the rigour of the common law. However, the modern law of trusts has seen a determination to introduce greater formality, as discussed in Chapter 3. This tension between a traditional flexibility and a modern desire for rigidity and certainty underpins the dramatic developments in the law in the last decade. But before jumping into the thrills of recent case law, we should begin at the beginning ...
