Should Trusts be Legal Persons?
On 20 May 2025, the Obligations Group hosted a lunchtime seminar titled ‘Should Trusts be Legal Persons?’ presented by Associate Professor Adam Hofri-Winogradow (University of British Columbia).
While trusts are not currently legal persons for trusts law purposes, they are often treated as if they were legal persons for other purposes, including tax and standing. Some trusts are in practice structured so as to emulate corporations, as in the appointment of a board and a CEO. Some specialized trust regimes are explicitly designed as legal persons. Scholars have approached this reality in different ways: while Lionel Smith has seen treating trusts as legal persons as a mistake, some U.S. scholars believe that common law trusts are functionally entities, with trustees serving in a representative capacity. The latter position is having a practical impact on U.S. law. In this seminar Associate Professor Adam Hofri-Winogradow examined whether the law of trusts should be redesigned so as to make them legal persons. He finds that on balance, a careful, informed entification of the trust may well be desirable.
Photo by Max Bender on Unsplash
About the Speaker
Adam Hofri-Winogradow is an Associate Professor at the Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia, Canada. He holds a DPhil from Oxford and three other degrees, including a BMus from Berklee College of Music. A longtime member of the Society of Trusts and Estates Practitioners, Adam’s research and teaching have long focused on trusts, including comparative doctrinal treatments of trust law topics, empirical studies of the ways trusts are used in practice by different sorts of clients, studies of many jurisdictions' recent dramatic reforms to their law of trusts, looking to make that law alternately client- and practitioner-friendly, historical and socio-legal accounts of the development of trust law and practice, and theoretical accounts of the social and economic functions trusts fulfil, including as a tool for subverting other parts of the law. Adam's research has been quoted and relied on by social justice organizations such as the Tax Justice Network and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.