Fiduciary Law and Equity: Enforcing Loyalty
In this essay, I suggest that the combination of formal and remedial techniques that equity courts traditionally have applied to the problem of trustee loyalty is strongly oriented to deterrence. One consequence is that when loyalty and prudence conflict, primacy for loyalty is built into the structure of fiduciary law. It is open to courts to reduce the role of loyalty in trust law by softening the standards currently applied to trustees. A change of this type, however, would not be a minor adjustment in the law governing trustees, but would instead represent fundamental structural change.