Introduction
The English legal genius that attached an obligation of conscience to the title to property brought into being what Frederick Maitland famously described as ‘perhaps the greatest and most distinctive achievement of English lawyers’. Since their first medieval appearance as ‘uses’, trusts have established themselves as the main estate planning and wealth management arrangement of the western legal tradition. Trusts succeeded in withstanding a fatal attempt to legislate them out of existence under King Henry VIII’s Statute of Uses of 1535. They subsequently spread across five continents following the expansion of the British Empire: indeed, ‘trusts’—along with ‘trade’ and ‘tea’—were one of the ‘three Ts’ traditionally associated with British civilization.