Article on Defining Duties of the Trustee’s Delegates

William S. Echols (J.D. Candidate, Texas Tech University School of Law, May 2015) recently published a comment entitled, Action in the Chasm: Defining Duties of the Trustee’s Delegates, Estate Planning and Community Property Law Journal, Vol. 6 Bk. 2, Summer 2014. Provided below is the introduction of the comment:

The first question begged by the title, is “what is a chasm?” The answer to that, within the confines of this Comment, is the space that either legislative of judicial action leaves undefined. The specific chasm in this piece is that of the duties owed by a person to whom the trustee delegates fiduciary authority. In most instances, this will be an agent of the trust, whose duties to the beneficiaries are undefined by the contract or the trust instrument, which makes the agent’s liability an open question. This question of liability is an area that remains unanswered by the judiciary and substantially so by legislatures as well.