Philosophical Foundations Of Fiduciary Law

Fiduciary law is one of the most important areas of private law, governing a wide range of relationships that affect people in their daily lives. These new and innovative essays explore the foundations of fiduciary relationships and the duties fiduciaries owe to their beneficiaries.

Contractual and fiduciary relationships are the two primary mechanisms through which the law facilitates coordinated pursuit of our personal interests. These fields are often represented in oppositional terms, and many accept the distinction that contract law allows an individual to pursue their interests independently, while fiduciary law allows an individual to pursue their interests in a dependent or interdependent way. Relying on this distinction, however, seems to suggest that the boundaries between the fields of contract and fiduciary law are fixed rather than fluid. Bringing together leading theorists to analyse critically important philosophical questions at the intersection of contract and fiduciary law, Contract, Status, and Fiduciary Law demonstrates that popular characterizations of the relationship between contract and fiduciary law are overly simplistic. By considering how contract and fiduciary law interact, and not just how they differ, the contributors to this volume offer new insights into a range of topics, including: status relationships, voluntary undertakings, duties of loyalty, equity, employment law, tort law, the law of remedies, political theory, and the theory of the firm.

Explores the interactions of fiduciary law and personal and political trust in private, public and international law.

In Fiduciary Law, Tamar Frankel examines the structure, principles, themes, and objectives of fiduciary law. Fiduciaries, which include corporate managers, money managers, lawyers, and physicians among others, are entrusted with money or power. Frankel explains how fiduciary law is designed to offer protection from abuse of this method of safekeeping. She deals with fiduciaries in general, and identifies situations in which fiduciary law falls short of offering protection. Frankel analyzes fiduciary debates, and argues that greater preventive measures are required. She offers guidelines for determining the boundaries and substance of fiduciary law, and discusses how failure to enforce fiduciary law can contribute to failing financial and economic systems. Frankel offers ideas and explanations for the courts, regulators, and legislatures, as well as the fiduciaries and entrustors. She argues for strong legal protection against abuse of entrustment as a means of encouraging fiduciary services in society. Fiduciary Law can help lawyers and policy makers designing the future law and the systems that it protects.

The Oxford Handbook of Fiduciary Law provides a comprehensive overview of critical topics in fiduciary law and theory through chapters authored by leading scholars. The Handbook opens with surveys of the many fields of law in which fiduciary duties arise, including agency law, trust law, corporate law, pension law, bankruptcy law, family law, employment law, legal representation, health care, and international law. Drawing on these surveys, the Handbook offers a synthetic analysis of fiduciary law's key concepts and principles. Chapters in the Handbook explore the defining features of fiduciary relationships, clarify the distinctive fiduciary duties that arise in these relationships, and identify the remedies available for breach of fiduciary duties. The volume also provides numerous comparative perspectives on fiduciary law from eminent legal historians and from scholars with deep expertise in a diverse array of the world's legal systems. Finally, the Handbook lays the groundwork for future research on fiduciary law and theory by highlighting cross-cutting themes, identifying persistent theoretical and practical challenges, and exploring how the field could be enriched through empirical analysis and interdisciplinary insights from economics, philosophy, and psychology. Unparalleled in its breadth and depth of coverage, The Oxford Handbook of Fiduciary Law represents an invaluable resource for practitioners, policymakers, scholars, and students in this essential field of law.

The law enables private parties to undo the wrongs committed against them, allowing victims to seek redress. A distinctive kind of justice governs our legal rights of redress, different from the leading corrective justice approaches. Through analysis of this key idea, The Right of Redress helps to make sense of tort, contract, fiduciary law, and unjust enrichment doctrine. When a wrong is remedied, the authorship of that remedy matters. The justice in private law is sensitive to a right holder's authorship, and understanding how solves a number of legal theory puzzles. Many forms of redress are only available with state assistance, and a full account of private law requires an account of the state's responsibility to assist. It also requires an explanation of those cases in which the state declines to assist. Prior accounts have drawn on Kantian principles or a Lockean social contract theory, where The Right of Redress, drawing on public fiduciary theory, develops a distinctive account of the state's role. This book offers a new take on various modern features of the private law landscape, ranging from equity, to damage caps, to arbitration, to corporate claims, to class actions. The Right of Redress thus offers a pathbreaking account of the justice in private law, the political theory that underlies it, and the contemporary features that shape our rights of redress today.

The idea that the state is a fiduciary to its citizens has a long pedigree - ultimately reaching back to the ancient Greeks, and including Hobbes and Locke among its proponents. Public fiduciary theory is now experiencing a resurgence, with applications that range from international law, to insider trading by members of Congress, to election law and gerrymandering. This book is the first of its kind: a collection of chapters by leading writers on public fiduciary subject areas. The authors develop new accounts of how fiduciary principles apply to representation; to officials and judges; to problems of legitimacy and political obligation; to positive rights; to the state itself; and to the history of ideas. The resulting volume should be of great interest to political theorists and public law scholars, to private fiduciary law scholars, and to students seeking an introduction to this new and increasingly relevant area of study.

The Research Handbook on Fiduciary Law offers specially commissioned chapters written by leading scholars and covers a wide range of important topics in fiduciary law. Topical contributions discuss: various fiduciary relationships; the duty of loyalty and other fiduciary obligations; fiduciary remedies; the role of equity; the role of trust; international and comparative perspectives; and public fiduciary law. This Research Handbook will be of interest to readers concerned with both theory and practice, as it incorporates significant new insights and developments in the field.