• Offered for Year: 2025/26

• Module Leader(s): Mr William Norcup-Brown
• Lecturer: Dr Yang Guo, Dr Anna McClean

• Owning School: Newcastle Law School
• Teaching Location: Newcastle City Campus

Semesters

Your programme is made up of credits, the total differs on programme to programme.

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

Teaching Methods

Teaching Activities

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 Methods

The format of resits will be determined by the Board of Examiners

Exams

Other Assessment

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.

Reading Lists

• LAW2263's Reading List

Timetable

• Timetable Website: www.ncl.ac.uk/timetable/
• LAW2263's Timetable