Module Catalogue 2025/26

Pre Requisite Comment

N/A

Co Requisite Comment

N/A

Aims

1) To develop a comprehensive understanding of the fundamental principles of equity, with a particular focus on the institution of 'the trust.'

2) To understand the use of the trust in its original social context and in a modern context, both domestic and commercial.

3) To understand how the trust operates, and why it must operate within these constraints.

4) To develop critical views of the aims, approaches and doctrines equity takes.

Outline Of Syllabus

What is 'Equity': equity as assisting the common law or equity as an independent jurisprudence?

The institution of the trust
Topics to do with its nature, constitution, management, obligations and regulation, including judicial responses to things going wrong

Third party claims (personal/ proprietary)

Topics importing logically-ordered reasoning and multifactorial reasoning

Precise details within these bounds to be specified in the course handbook and topic outline. Whilst the module's precise content may vary from year to year, it is envisaged that the syllabus will cover some or all of the following topics:

1. Express Trusts: Three Certainties, Constitution and Formalities
2. Resulting Trusts
3. Purposive and Charitable Trusts
4. Trusts of Land and the 'Common Intention Constructive Trust'
5. Liability for Breach of Trust and Equitable Remedies

Intended Knowledge Outcomes

By the end of this module, students will be able to demonstrate:

1) a deep and critical understanding of the rules, principles and purposes of the syllabus topics (black-letter analysis), including how themes recur in different topics and how related doctrines and principles fit together ('coherence'), and;

2) a critical appreciation of the transformation of those subjects for the modern age.

Intended Skill Outcomes

Legal skills

Legal problem solving: The ability to identify issues and apply the relevant principles and rules. The ability to match legal concepts to these principles to better apply them. The ability to distinguish material and immaterial differences. The ability to identify the information required to solve a problem. The ability to work through the raw information towards a final answer or series of alternatives, and to narrow the issues. The ability to make reasoned judgements based on the logic of the law and the plausibility of carying options.

Legal evaluation: The ability to identify issues and arguments. The ability to assess the differing effects of legal frameworks. The ability to evaluate the legal rules, principles and arguments against their policy or other objectives. The ability to synthesize different arguments. The ability to adopt and defend a position and to critique a counter-position.


Wider application: The ability to relate the legal issues to both commercial decisions and to policy-making.

Communication: The ability to write or present matters in a clear and structured manner.


Research: The ability to identify legal and other issues, and to identify and retrieve relevant materials from primary and secondary sources.


Cognitive skills

Application: The ability to apply knowledge learned and comprehended to new situations, and determine the consequences of the present or proposed law on new fact patterns or to policy questions.


Analysis: The ability to identify the relevant issues and the corresponding concepts, and order them by importance.


Synthesis: The ability to identify common and competing positions or concepts, and to understand when such matters align with, or diverge from, the legal issues, principles and rules.


Evaluation: The ability to identify the rational consequences of competing arguments or solutions, and the extent of their differences.


Critical judgement: The ability to weigh up the merits or validity of competing arguments, allegations, consequences or similar matters.

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

Lecturing will be used to provide an overview of both matters that need to be known in outline (where little further reading is required), and also matters that need to be known in detail, where it must be followed up with self-study from textbook chapters and academic articles.

Self-study is critical in order for the learner to grasp the detail and to spend time considering the material in depth, and for working through problems and constructing arguments at a slow enough pace for deep learning.

Seminars focus on developing students' understanding and knowledge of the law, as formulated at a basic level from the lectures and self-study. Students can check they have understood the foundational materials properly, before stretching their understandings of the law and key concepts further through comprehensive, analytical discussion.

Learners should close the feedback loop by reconsidering the seminar material that they have not fully understood or completed, after a seminar, in further self-study.

Five seminar cycles are required to meet the knowledge and skills objectives.

Consultation hours are another way of closing the feedback loop. Here, individual feedback and discussion is provided for matters that require further clarification following a seminar or lecture, or from a student's further reading.

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

The assessed essay provides an opportunity to demonstrate research, writing and analytical skills. It requires the students to spend longer deepening their understanding and making connections across related doctrines and norms. It requires examination of how these norms and doctrines can or might work together in harmony or in tension. It requires the identification of how one constrains another, or how a change in one changes another. Such matters require considerable development of their ideas across a longer period of time.

At a basic level, examination provides the opportunity to demonstrate achievement of the knowledge-based outcomes of the syllabus. It also precludes, for the most part, skipping large parts of the module and even cheating. But memorisation is a lesser objective. More important is that examination provides: (i) the opportunity to demonstrate problem solving skills; and (ii) mental agility.

As noted in the assessment framework, the use of a low-stakes summative assessment can be more beneficial than a formative assessment, hence the arrangement. The students are incentivised to complete it because it carries weight through to the finals, but not so much weight that it can be highly damaging if things go wrong. Thus its feedback element is an important justification for this arrangement.

General Notes

N/A