Law Lecturers Nick Piska and Dr Hayley Gibson have been successful in their application to the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) to fund a workshop revisiting Professor Roger Cotterrell’s critical scholarship in the field of trusts law.
The workshop, entitled ‘Property, Power and the Law of Trusts Revisited’, is to be held in October 2017 and will bring together trusts lawyers to discuss how trust law and practice has developed or changed in the 30 years since Professor Cotterrell’s ground-breaking article ‘Power, Property and the Law of Trusts: A Partial Agenda for Critical Legal Scholarship’. Themes to be explored include ideology and the state, power, economic and gender inequality, public benefit, and ethical investment.
Dr Gibson said: ‘This symposium invites a timely reflection upon the work begun by Cotterrell 30 years ago of extending critical legal thought to the area of trusts. ‘Power, Property and the Law of Trusts’ provided the key to new inquiries into how the ideology inherent in the property form extends to, and is exacerbated by, the function of the trust. We hope that the symposium will allow for a reflection on how widely critique can be used in the area of trusts; and how the form of the trust can open up new directions in critical thought.’
Nick Piska said: ‘A symposium on the politics of trusts is more pressing than ever given the increasing gulf between the richest and poorest in society and the role that the trust industry plays in global wealth management. Too often the trust is ignored, probably because it is not well understood by non-lawyers, and the focus is on the corporate form. We hope this workshop will go some way towards redressing the balance.’
The workshop is the fifth event organised through Kent Law School’s Equity & Trusts Research Network. It follows the publication of a double special issue of Polemos on ‘Equity and the Resources of Critique’ including papers presented at a workshop held at Kent in 2015 on that theme. The workshop in October is co-sponsored by Kent Law School research group Social Critiques of Law.
Anyone interested in finding out more, who would like to attend the workshop or who would like to be added to the Equity & Trusts Research Network, can contact Nick via email: n.piska@kent.ac.uk
