The Oxford Handbook of Fiduciary Law provides a comprehensive overview of critical topics in fiduciary law and theory through chapters authored by leading scholars. The Handbook opens with surveys of the many fields of law in which fiduciary duties arise, including agency law, trust law, corporate law, pension law, bankruptcy law, family law, employment law, legal representation, health care, and international law. Drawing on these surveys, the Handbook offers a synthetic analysis of fiduciary law's key concepts and principles. Chapters in the Handbook explore the defining features of fiduciary relationships, clarify the distinctive fiduciary duties that arise in these relationships, and identify the remedies available for breach of fiduciary duties. The volume also provides numerous comparative perspectives on fiduciary law from eminent legal historians and from scholars with deep expertise in a diverse array of the world's legal systems. Finally, the Handbook lays the groundwork for future research on fiduciary law and theory by highlighting cross-cutting themes, identifying persistent theoretical and practical challenges, and exploring how the field could be enriched through empirical analysis and interdisciplinary insights from economics, philosophy, and psychology. Unparalleled in its breadth and depth of coverage, The Oxford Handbook of Fiduciary Law represents an invaluable resource for practitioners, policymakers, scholars, and students in this essential field of law.

This book explores the foundations and evolution of modern corporate fiduciary law in the United States and the United Kingdom. Today US and UK fiduciary law provide very different approaches to the regulation of directorial behaviour. However, as the book shows, the law in both jurisdictions borrowed from the same sources in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English fiduciary and commercial law. The book identifies the shared legal foundations and authorities and explores the drivers of corporate fiduciary law's contemporary divergence. In so doing it challenges the prevailing accounts of corporate legal change and stability in the US and the UK.

Leading scholars analyze key issues in fiduciary duties in business―one of the most salient applications of fiduciary law and theory.

In Fiduciary Law, Tamar Frankel examines the structure, principles, themes, and objectives of fiduciary law. Fiduciaries, which include corporate managers, money managers, lawyers, and physicians among others, are entrusted with money or power. Frankel explains how fiduciary law is designed to offer protection from abuse of this method of safekeeping. She deals with fiduciaries in general, and identifies situations in which fiduciary law falls short of offering protection. Frankel analyzes fiduciary debates, and argues that greater preventive measures are required. She offers guidelines for determining the boundaries and substance of fiduciary law, and discusses how failure to enforce fiduciary law can contribute to failing financial and economic systems. Frankel offers ideas and explanations for the courts, regulators, and legislatures, as well as the fiduciaries and entrustors. She argues for strong legal protection against abuse of entrustment as a means of encouraging fiduciary services in society. Fiduciary Law can help lawyers and policy makers designing the future law and the systems that it protects.

This book is about fiduciary law’s influence on the financial economy’s environmental performance, focusing on how the law affects responsible investing and considering possible legal reforms to shift financial markets closer towards sustainability. Fiduciary law governs how trustees, fund managers or other custodians administer the investment portfolios owned by beneficiaries. Written for a diverse audience, not just legal scholars, the book examines in a multi-jurisdictional context an array of philosophical, institutional and economic issues that have shaped the movement for responsible investing and its legal framework. Fiduciary law has acquired greater influence in the financial economy in tandem with the extraordinary recent growth of institutional funds such as pension plans and insurance company portfolios. While the fiduciary prejudice against responsible investing has somewhat waned in recent years, owing mainly to reinterpretations of fiduciary and trust law, significant barriers remain. This book advances the notion of ‘nature’s trust’ to metaphorically signal how fiduciary responsibility should accommodate society’s dependence on long-term environmental well-being. Financial institutions, managing vast investment portfolios on behalf of millions of beneficiaries, should manage those investments with regard to the broader social interest in sustaining ecological health. Even for their own financial self-interest, investors over the long-term should benefit from maintaining nature’s capital. We should expect everyone to act in nature’s trust, from individual funds to market regulators. The ancient public trust doctrine could be refashioned for stimulating this change, and sovereign wealth funds should take the lead in pioneering best practices for environmentally responsible investing.

The idea that the state is a fiduciary to its citizens has a long pedigree - ultimately reaching back to the ancient Greeks, and including Hobbes and Locke among its proponents. Public fiduciary theory is now experiencing a resurgence, with applications that range from international law, to insider trading by members of Congress, to election law and gerrymandering. This book is the first of its kind: a collection of chapters by leading writers on public fiduciary subject areas. The authors develop new accounts of how fiduciary principles apply to representation; to officials and judges; to problems of legitimacy and political obligation; to positive rights; to the state itself; and to the history of ideas. The resulting volume should be of great interest to political theorists and public law scholars, to private fiduciary law scholars, and to students seeking an introduction to this new and increasingly relevant area of study.

"This book is a practical guide for lawyers who are either beginning a fiduciary litigation practice or who are handling a fiduciary duty case in an unfamiliar area"--