Charity Law and the Legal Syllabus: Breaking Free from the Equity Straitjacket

For most undergraduate law students, the study of charity law is pigeonholed somewhere after extensive discussion of express trusts and resulting trusts and often between lectures on constructive trusts and trustees’ duties and liabilities. Charities are discussed in the context of charitable trusts and their difference from the private trust concept studied almost exclusively up until that point. In the 1980s and 1990s, a trust law lecturer would aim, in the few hours at his/her disposal to teach charity law, to cover the Pemsel heads of charity with a seam of case law for each, unpack the anomalies in the treatment of public benefit, recounting the tales of poor and worn out clerks and poor relations and, if lucky, elaborate on the doctrine of cy près and the different treatments of initial and subsequent impossibility. A bountiful year might yield an extra hour somewhere to devote to private purpose trusts, allowing students to contemplate the mysteries of pet animal trusts, statues to commemorate oneself and the difficulties caused by well-meaning people who set out to promote the ‘maintenance . . . of good understanding . . . between nations’ and ‘the preservation of the independence and integrity of newspapers.