Gary Watt

Trusts and equity

PART I: INTRODUCTION TO TRUSTS AND EQUITY 1. Foundations 2. Equitable doctrines, remedies and maxims 3. Trusts in context PART II: CREATION AND RECOGNITION OF TRUSTS 4. Trusts created expressly 5. Effective disposition of benefit: constitution of trusts 6. Ineffective disposition of benefit: resulting trusts PART III: TRUST CREATION AND PUBLIC POLICY 7. Formality, perpetuity and illegality 8. Charity and cy pres PART IV: CONSTRUCTIVE TRUSTS 9. Constructive trusts and informal trusts of land PART V: THE REGULATION OF TRUSTS 10. Flexibility of benefit 11. The fiduciary duty 12. Fulfilling and filling the office of trustee 13. Trustee Investment 14. Breach of trust: the personal liability of trustees PART VI: TRUSTS AND THIRD PARTIES 15. Tracing and recovering trust property 16. The equitable personal liability of strangers to the trust

Reflections on Creative Writing Within a Law and Literature Module

The short works of creative fiction submitted by undergraduate law students on the optional module in law and literature at the University of Warwick are discussed. Each piece of creative writing takes the form of a poem, a drama or a short work of prose fiction that engages with an aspect of law or justice.

The art of advocacy : renaissance of rhetoric in the law school

ABSTRACT This paper offers some ruminations on the place of rhetoric in modern legal education and some reflections on the undergraduate module The Art of Advocacy: Mooting and Forensic Rhetoric which the author devised and taught for the first time in 2016. The ‘art’ of advocacy is one which in practice works best when it is, or appears to be, most natural; just as the most convincing acting tends to be the most naturalistic. The relation of art to nature is a puzzle that has exercised rhetoricians since at least as far back as Cicero. Perhaps one solution lies in an appreciation of the relationship between practice and habit – the ideal being technically expert practice that becomes the advocate’s second nature.

Carey Young’s Palais de Justice

ABSTRACT The symposium for this issue comprises six responses to the video artwork Palais de Justice (2017) by artist Carey Young. The video presents a study of the life of Brussels’ vast, late-nineteenth-century court building. In Palais de Justice, Young presents ‘a legal system seemingly centered on, and perhaps controlled by women’. The respondents are Jeanne Gaakeer, Ruth Herz, Joan Kee, Linda Mulcahy, Jeremy Pilcher and Gary Watt. Jeanne Gaakeer and Ruth Herz have the distinction of being, not only internationally respected scholars, but also experienced judges. Jeanne Gaakeer is a judge practicing in the Netherlands and Ruth Herz was formerly a judge in Germany. The six responses are followed by the artist’s own reflections on her artwork and her response to the commentators’ responses. Joan Kee writes that ‘Young highlights access as a key entry point for thinking about the law. Who can avail themselves of the law? Who may enter (or exit) the courts? Who is excluded and by whose authority? The surreptitious looking and peering that define the experience of watching the film suggests how these questions deny ready answers’.

Creative Voices—Student Writing in Law and Literature

This occasional selection of undergraduate student writing includes three pieces arising from the module Law and Literature that is taught at Warwick Law School. The pieces included here comprise two poetic works and one essay. Also included, after the two poems by Warwick Law Students and before the essay, is a short allegorical poem on legal life that was submitted to this journal by a PhD candidate in Socio-Legal Studies, at York University, Toronto, Canada. Terry Trowbridge’s ‘Kitchen Dwellers and Legal Consciousness’ demonstrates that our approach at Warwick Law School to the creative study of Law and Literature is part of an endeavour to engage imaginatively with law that is internationally widespread even as it is deeply personal. The first of the Warwick Law Students’ poems is in the form of a rap, inspired by the controversial 2001 case of Re A (Separation of Conjoined Twins). The second poem by a Warwick Law Student is on the theme of high-speed rail, in particular the proposal for a new line that would dissect England from London to Birmingham. The poems have been included together here not only because of their high quality and effectiveness when considered in isolation, but because they are connected by a concern to lend voices to interests that cannot speak in the dominant discourse of economically calculable rights. It is poignant to consider how the environment has no independent voice in the high-speed rail debate, and how the same is true of the neonate in the case of conjoined twins. There is a telling silence at the heart of the matter. One of the ambitions of law and humanities might be to supply voices that the normal course of law leaves out. This brings me to the third piece of student work submitted to the Warwick Law School module on Law and Literature. Sean Mulcahy’s splendid essay was submitted, in somewhat shorter form than that offered here, in lieu of a final examination in the module Law and Literature. As a student visit-

The Matter of Metaphor in Language and Law

Abstract Metaphor is not merely a sub-set of rhetorical language, but language may be regarded as a sub-set of metaphor and all our ways of acquiring real meaning, language included, may be considered to be essentially metaphorical. Abstract reality is unknowable or knowable; meaningless or meaningful. If it is knowable and meaningful, it is only knowable and meaningful in a metaphorical sense. The argument that reality is metaphorical can be expressed as an argument that reality is our name for abstract reality as we perceive it and this is similar to Bertrand Russell’s argument that any object that we touch is not reliably real, but is merely a notion of an object inferred from what we know through our senses. It is because the gap between the thinker and the thing is in a certain sense “real” that we can say that the metaphorical bridge (and metaphor as bridge) which traverses the conceptual or cognitive gap is itself as concretely real as any thing.

The character of social connection in law and literature : lessons from Bleak House

This paper argues that law and society are disconnected in practice, and that this is attributable, in part, to law’s disconnection from the arts and humanities in our schemes of formal education. When we draw out the legal yarn from its cultural fabric, we find that it is remarkably thin. It is especially inadequate to describe the complexity of human interconnection, and even lacks a language to express such commonplace connections as unmarried romantic cohabitation and non-profit clubs. To understand human interconnection and the law’s connection to society, we must read the law ‘in context’ – as being one fabric, one textile, with other literatures – and we must read with an appropriate ethic. To that end, this paper reads the law in the context of Dickens’s Bleak House, which has been called ‘a novel of connections’, and Forster’s Howards End, which exhorts us to ‘connect the prose and the passion’.

Falstaff and the Highwaymen : Equity as Outlaw

There was a foolish highway man who resolved to robbed travelers upon a public road and give plunder to the poor.

A Review of The Culture of Equity in Early Modern England by Mark Fortier

Mark Fortier’s excellent study of The Culture of Equity in Early Modern England was clearly prompted by the same spirit of inter-disciplinary inquiry that inspires this journal. The aim of the book is, as the author puts it, to track equity through different areas of early modern concern. The book cites a wide range of classical and early modern metaphors for equity, but the author settles upon the metaphor of equity as a wild beast and extends it throughout the book; hence the need to ‘track’ equity. He finds an early modern source for the metaphor in William Lambarde’s gloss on Aristotle: