ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the way in which trusts are used in commercial transactions. One of the themes in many of the later sections of this book is the difficulties which ensue when disputes arising from the real-world activities of the parties to litigation – for example the financial transactions at issue in the local authority swaps cases – are dealt with by the courts according to the long-established norms of legal categories like contract law, trusts law and so on. What happens frequently is that the lawyers translate issues from the language of finance and commerce into the language of law. Sometimes this can lead to the courts dealing with the parties’ dispute in ways which the parties did not expect. This is mainly because law uses its own language and its own concepts when thinking about disputes. Law is primarily a language.1 In studying equity and trusts, you have had to learn a new language in which ordinary English words like ‘demise’, ‘trust’ and ‘interest’ have been given technical meanings by lawyers. This process of translation arises in all litigation: concepts from the real world are translated into legal concepts instead.
