Teaching Fiduciary Law

Charles E. Rounds Jr. (Professor of Law, Suffolk University Law School) has recently published his articled The Case for a Return to Mandatory Instruction in the Fiduciary Aspects of Agency and Trusts in the American Law School, Together with a Model Fiduciary Relations Course Syllabus, 18 Regent U. L. Rev. 251-270 (2005-2006).

Here is Prof. Rounds’ conclusion:

I have endeavored to make the case that it is conceptually incoherent for a law school to have a required curriculum which dos not include a course whose primary focus is the common law fiduciary relationship. I leave it to others to make the practical case for mandatory instruction in the fiduciary relationship, e.g., that agency and trusts are both tested on the bar examination, that agencies and trusts are components of most estate plans, or that a Fidelity mutual fund is a tangle of agency, trust, and contractual relationships. For me, it is not that a student unfamiliar with the fiduciary relationship will leave the law school unable to write a decent estate plan or understand how a Fidelity mutual fund is legally structured; rather, it is that he or she will enter the real world ill-equipped to make legal and ethical diagnoses. That is bad for the student, bad for society, and bad for the law.