Trust Litigation in Chancery

Dr. Neil G. Jones (Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge) recently published his article entitled Trusts Litigation in Chancery after the Statute of Uses: The First Fifty Years, Legal History and Legal Process (Cambridge University Press, 2011). The abstract available on SSRN is below:

The study of trusts in the record of the early-modern court of Chancery has so far been largely thematic, picking out, for example, cases indicating the non-execution of certain types of uses, or grouping together trusts created for particular purposes, and paying little attention to why trust cases came to litigation, or to how the court responded from case to case, No attempt has yet been made to examine a body of trust cases over a more-or-less extended period as illuminating the features of trusts litigation as a whole. This paper begins the process of filling this gap through an examination of trusts litigation in Chancery between the Statute of Uses 1536 and 1585, considering the nature of trust property; the causes of litigation; questions of proof; and the court’s responses to trusts litigation.