Trusts For Sale

Abstract

Of the various devices for facilitating the disposition of property which conveyancers have invented, the trust for sale has been in the past one of the most useful, and its utility has been greatly extended by the Property Acts of 1925. Most students of the law first come across it in the famous argument of Lord Eldon, then John Scott, in Ackròyd v. Smithson (1780, 1 Bro. C.C. 503), and the rebuff he received when, a little later, he argued, or tried to argue, on the other side. “Mr. Scott,” the Chancellor of the Lancaster Chancery Court said to him, “I have read your argument in that case of Ackroyd v. Smithson, and I defy you or any man in England to answer it.” That was on the doctrine of conversion, the immediate result of a trust for sale, and the refinements to which the doctrine led formed, till the recent legislation, one of the most important branches of equity. With the abolition of the heir at law, and the distribution, in cases of intestacy, of the proceeds of real estate among the new statutory next of kin, these refinements have become obsolete so far as regards the property of persons dying after 1925, but the immediate operation of a trust for sale—the power conferred on the trustees of making a title to the land—remains.