Trusts and Equity Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Trusts and Equity - Essay Example In both cases, Chambers writes equity assumptions that the owner was not intended to receive the benefit of the property and raises a resulting trust in favour of the provider of that property. In Re Vandervell's Trusts (No. 2), Megarry J. concluded that the resulting trust operated on different principles in each of these two situations. His lordship classified the resulting trust of an apparent gift as 'presumed' and the resulting trust on the failure of an express trust as 'automatic'. The presumed resulting trust was said to be based on the presumed intention of the provider of the property to create it and could be rebutted by evidence to the contrary. The automatic resulting trust arose independently of intention and was indisputable 2. Resulting trusts arise by operation of law settled on by equity. That means trust is dependant on the decisions of equity particularly in conditions where property has been transferred to another and the provider of that property did not intend to benefit the recipient, equity responds by imposing a resulting trust. The distinction between express and resulting trusts is that the former are created by an intention to create a trust, whereas the latter arise because of a lack of intention to benefit the recipient 3. Geldart writes, "Apart from Common Law and Statute Law, the most important department of our legal system is Equity" 4. That means the vitality of equity is apparent in English law system, that's why when the terms 'law' and 'equity' are used in legal sense, it does not concern about equity being an aspect of law and order, all it means is two different kinds of law the Common Law on the one side while the rules of Equity on the other. It is due to the rule that morally and legally binds to the decisions enforced by the courts. These two sets of rules imposed in the terms of 'law' and 'equity', must not be looked upon as two co-ordinate and independent systems. On the contrary, the rules of Equity are only a sort of supplement or appendix to the Common Law; they assume its existence but they add something further. In this way Equity is an addition to the Common Law. Further, the rules of Equity, though they did not contradict the rules of Common Law, in effect and in practice produce a result opposed to that which would have been produced if the Common Law rules had remained alone. A Common Law right was practically, though not theoretically, nullified by the existence of a countervailing equitable right 5. Though since the Judicature Act came into force in 1875 the rules of Common Law and Equity are recognised and administered in the same court, yet they still remain distinct bodies of law, governed largely by different principles. In order to ascertain the rights to which any given set of facts gives rise, we must always ask (i) what is the rule of Common Law (ii) What difference (if any) is made in the working of this rule by the existence of some rule of Equity applying to the case 6 Like the Common Law, the rules of Equity are judicial law, i.e. to find them we must look in the first instances to the decisions of the judges who have administered Equity. But some branches