Natural justice and the Court’s supervisory jurisdiction

Abstract

Abstract The Court’s supervisory jurisdiction over the administration of trusts is a cornerstone of the law and well known to practitioners. However, although there are countless decided cases in which Courts around the common law world have made decisions and exercised powers that have their footing in the supervisory jurisdiction, and the topic is addressed in detail in Daniel Clarry’s excellent “The Supervisory Jurisdiction over Trust Administration”,1 there is surprisingly little consideration in the authorities of the juridical foundation of the jurisdiction and the ways in which the role of the Court differs from that played in ordinary adversarial litigation. One point that has not, until recently, been considered in the decided cases is the extent to which rules of natural justice apply when the Court exercises its supervisory jurisdiction and in particular whether a trustee has a right to be heard prior to being removed. The purpose of this article is to consider this issue and the Court of Appeal of Bermuda’s recent decision in St. John’s Trust Company (PVT) Ltd v Medlands (PTC) Ltd.2