Americans now hold trillions of dollars in individual retirement savings accounts, raising concerns about conflicts of interest among financial advisers who provide advice to retirement savers. Prompted by these concerns, in April 2016 the Department of Labor promulgated a rule that imposes on...

In April 2019, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) on the definition of "fiduciary capacity" regarding "directed trusts." The ANPR references in particular the Uniform Directed Trust Act (UDTA) (Unif. Law Comm'n 2017). We...

In this chapter, prepared for The Oxford Handbook of New Private Law, we identify the principal ways in which the common law trust has been used as an instrument of private ordering in American practice. We argue that in both law and function, contemporary American trust law has divided into...

Directed trusts have become a familiar feature of trust practice in spite of considerable legal uncertainty about them. Fortunately, the Uniform Law Commission has just finished work on the Uniform Directed Trust Act (UDTA), a new uniform law that offers clear solutions to the many legal...

In March 2020, the Securities and Exchange Commission asked for public comment on the names rule (rule 35d-1) for mutual funds in light of developments since the rule's adoption in 2001. Among such developments, the request for comment identifies burgeoning investor interest in environmental,...

In both the publicly-traded corporation and the private donative trust a crucial task is to minimize the agency costs that arise from the separation of risk-bearing and management. But where the law of corporate governance evolved in the shadow of capital-market checks on agency costs, trust...

This Article develops an agency costs theory of the law of private trusts, focusing chiefly on donative trusts. The agency costs approach offers fresh insights into recurring problems in trust law including, among others, modification and termination, settlor standing, fiduciary litigation,...

This is a transcript of a roundtable discussion between Robert Pritzker of The Marmon Group, Inc., Vice-Chancellor Jack Jacobs of the Delaware Court of Chancery, and Law Professors William Carney, Richard Painter, and Robert Sitkoff, with Professor Carney serving as moderator. The general topic...

Trustees and other investment fiduciaries of pensions, charities, and personal trusts, and those who advise them, face increasing pressure to rely on ESG factors in the investment management of tens of trillions of dollars of other people's money. At the same time, however, confusion abounds...