ABSTRACT
The trust is English law’s greatest gift to jurisprudence, according to the legal historian Maitland.1 Whether or not that is true, the trust has certainly become a peculiarly English way of thinking. The trust concept, whether created deliberately by ordinary people or used by a court to remedy unconscionable behaviour, is one of the fundamental techniques with which English lawyers analyse the world. Its current form is an accident of English history and as much as part of that history as kings and queens, Magna Carta and the Gunpowder Plot. Then again, English law is as much a creature of history as of modern culture, politics and sociology.
