The Anglo-American Trust is Powerful and Nimble, but not a Magician

The great English legal scholar, Frederic William Maitland (1850-1906), saw the trust as “an ‘institute’ of great elasticity and generality; as elastic, as general as contract.” It is hard to disagree. Most mutual funds are trusts. Thousands upon thousands of sub-prime mortgages are currently parked in trusts. The trust as an instrument of commerce is ubiquitous. But the properties of the trust are not magical. Charles E. Rounds, Jr. explains in Chapter 1 of Loring and Rounds: A Trustee’s Handbook (2012). The passage is excerpted below.