This essay revisits the economic theory of fiduciary law. Nearly two decades have passed since the publication of the seminal economic analyses of fiduciary law by Cooter and Freedman (1991), and by Easterbrook and Fischel (1993), which together have come to underpin the prevailing economic,...

This chapter provides an accessible overview of our previous work on the impact of the abolition of the Rule Against Perpetuities (RAP) on trust fund situs. The implementation of the Generation Skipping Transfer (GST) Tax by the Tax Reform Act of 1986 sparked a movement to repeal the RAP. Since...

This article reports the results of an empirical study of the effect of the new prudent investor rule on asset allocation by institutional trustees. Using federal banking data spanning 1986 through 1997, the authors find that, after adoption of the new prudent investor rule, institutional...

In recent years, the study of fiduciary law has undergone a paradigm shift. Rather than treat fiduciary principles as subsidiary elements of legal fields, such as trust law or corporate law, a burgeoning group of scholars has undertaken to study fiduciary law as a coherent general field of study...

Perpetual trusts are an established feature of today’s estate planning firmament. Yet little-noticed provisions in the constitutions of nine states, including in five states that purport to allow perpetual trusts by statute, proscribe “perpetuities.” This Article examines those provisions...

This Article presents the first empirical study of the domestic jurisdictional competition for trust funds. To allow donors to exploit a loophole in the federal estate tax, since 1986 a host of states have abolished the Rule Against Perpetuities as applied to interests in trust. To allow...

This article reports the results of an empirical study of the effect of the new prudent investor rule on asset allocation by institutional trustees. Using federal banking data spanning 1986 through 1997, the authors find that, after adoption of the new prudent investor rule, institutional...

The theme of this essay, a commentary on two papers forthcoming in the same volume on “The Worlds of the Trust,” is that trust law is not a species of property law or contract law, but rather is a species of organizational law. Organizational law supplies a set of contractarian rules, some...

The trust has long competed with the corporation as a form of business organization. Although today the corporate form dominates the trust for the organization of operating enterprises, the trust dominates the corporation in a handful of specialized niches. The market value of these niches...

This chapter restates the economic theory of fiduciary law, making several fresh contributions. First, it elaborates on earlier work by clarifying the agency problem that is at the core of all fiduciary relationships. In consequence of this common economic structure, there is a common doctrinal...