Editorial

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Professor Maitland liked to point out that the beginnings of the trust are discernible in a ‘slight but unbroken thread of cases, beginning while the Conquest is yet recent.’1 This forensic Methuselah retains its vitality today because reams of contractual boilerplate cannot compete with the efficiency of equity's default rules. These were famously expressed by the great Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals—later to become a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States—Benjamin Cardozo, in Meinhard v. Salmon, 249 NY 458, 464 (1928): Many forms of conduct permissible in a workaday world for those acting at arm's length, are forbidden to those bound by fiduciary ties. A trustee is held to something stricter than the morals of the market place. Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior. As to this there...