Understanding the Trust: The Bigger Picture

On 9 December 2025, the Obligations Group were pleased to host a lecture presented by Professor Ben McFarlane (University of Oxford) and chaired by Professor Andrew Robertson.

The trust is rightly regarded as equity’s most significant contribution to the law, but the nature of the trust is a matter of long-standing scholarly debate. It is also crucial to the resolution of certain commercial disputes and so is of more than merely academic interest. In this talk, Professor Ben McFarlane argued that the simple model of the trust that is often used, of a trustee holding on trust for a single beneficiary, can mislead us into thinking that the trust involves a split between legal and equitable ownership, and that the claims of a beneficiary against a trustee aim to protect that beneficiary from suffering loss and so are similar to claims in contract or tort. Looking at the bigger picture, which includes both charitable trusts and discretionary trusts, as well as the wider question of the relationship between common law and equity, forces us to rethink that model, and shows us that some key features of the trust can exist even in the absence of a beneficiary with an immediate entitlement to the trust assets.

^{Photo by Andreas Brucker on Unsplash}