A contingent equitable remainder-in-corpus incident to an ongoing irrevocable trust relationship is more than a mere expectancy. The holder of such a remainder will have the requisite standing to seek judicial enforcement of the trust’s terms and/or redress for breaches of trust. This is the case even when someone else is the current beneficiary. Here is why: When the trust became irrevocable, the holder received an enforceable present “vested” equitable property right in a contingent equitable property interest, this though the interest itself may never actually vest, i.e., become possessory, in the particular holder. A contingent interest is subject to a condition precedent, such as survivorship. In Estate of Davis, 469 P.3d 16 (Idaho 2020), the trial court had deemed such a remainder a mere expectancy, a costly misapprehension of a core principle of the Anglo-American legal tradition, costly particularly for the innocent owners of those property rights. On the other hand, in the case of a trust that is currently revocable, the rights, duties, and obligations of the parties to the relationship are quite different, a topic that is taken up generally in §8.11 of Loring and Rounds: A Trustee’s Handbook (2021), which section is reproduced in its entirety in the Appendix below.
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