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

The Research Handbook on Fiduciary Law offers specially commissioned chapters written by leading scholars and covers a wide range of important topics in fiduciary law. Topical contributions discuss: various fiduciary relationships; the duty of loyalty and other fiduciary obligations; fiduciary remedies; the role of equity; the role of trust; international and comparative perspectives; and public fiduciary law. This Research Handbook will be of interest to readers concerned with both theory and practice, as it incorporates significant new insights and developments in the field.

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.

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.

Using path-breaking discoveries of cognitive science, Mark Johnson argues that humans are fundamentally imaginative moral animals, challenging the view that morality is simply a system of universal laws dictated by reason. According to the Western moral tradition, we make ethical decisions by applying universal laws to concrete situations. But Johnson shows how research in cognitive science undermines this view and reveals that imagination has an essential role in ethical deliberation. Expanding his innovative studies of human reason in Metaphors We Live By and The Body in the Mind, Johnson provides the tools for more practical, realistic, and constructive moral reflection.

This book explores the application of concepts of fiduciary duty or public trust in responding to the policy and governance challenges posed by policy problems that extend over multiple terms of government or even, as in the case of climate change, human generations. The volume brings together a range of perspectives including leading international thinkers on questions of fiduciary duty and public trust, Australia's most prominent judicial advocate for the application of fiduciary duty, top law scholars from several major universities, expert commentary from an influential climate policy think-tank and the views of long-serving highly respected past and present parliamentarians. The book presents a detailed examination of the nature and extent of fiduciary duty, looking at the example of Australia and having regard to developments in comparable jurisdictions. It identifies principles that could improve the accountability of political actors for their responses to major problems that may extend over multiple electoral cycles.

This book is a primer on corporate law for law students and anyone else interested in the foundations of corporate law. The book provides a self-contained, accessible presentation of the field's essentials: what corporations are, how they are governed, their interactions with their investors and other stakeholders, major transactions (M&A), and parallels with alternative entities including partnerships. Optional background chapters cover the investor ecosystem, contemporary corporate governance, and corporate finance. The book's exposition of doctrine and policy is nuanced and sophisticated yet short and simple enough for a quick read. "An astonishingly lucid summary, I wish I had it when I was in law school." -Sarath Sanga, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law "Corporations in 100 Pages achieves the impossible: it offers a masterfully clear and concise exposition of corporate law and its motivating principles, without dumbing down the subject matter. I recommend it to all of my students-it's an invaluable resource." -Elisabeth de Fontenay, Duke University School of Law

The scholarship on fiduciary duties in business organizations is often pulled in two directions. While most observers would agree that business organizations are one of the key contexts for the application of the fiduciary obligation, corporate law theorists have often expressed disdain for the role of fiduciary duties, with the result that fiduciary law and theory have been out of step with the business world. This volume aims to rectify this situation by bringing together a range of scholars to analyze fiduciary relationships and the fiduciary obligation in the business context. Contributing authors examine fiduciary obligations in fields ranging from entity structure to bankruptcy to investment regulation. The volume demonstrates that fiduciary law can inform pressing corporate governance debates, including discussions over stakeholder models of the corporation that move beyond shareholder interests.

This volume brings together three separate works written by Paul Finn over nearly 40 years. The first, Fiduciary Obligations, was published in 1977. It has been out of print for many years, though it is still widely cited both in judicial decisions in common law countries and in international scholarship on fiduciary law. It has been regarded widely as a 'seminal' or 'classic' piece. Its publication preceded two important developments. The first was the High Court of Australia's systematic reappraisal of equity jurisprudence in the 1980s. This contributed significantly to the shaping and future direction of modern fiduciary law in Australia. The second was the growth in civil litigation in common law countries against banks, advisers in many guises, commercial 'agents', franchisees, joint venturers and other commercial actors which raised issues as to the extent to which, if at all, functions they performed for customers, etc, could attract strict fiduciary standards of conduct or merely those lesser standards otherwise imposed by the common law or equity.These two developments inform the second work in the volume, "The Fiduciary Principle", which was published in Canada in 1989, but is relatively unknown in Australia. Though its scope was limited designedly to those standards of conduct the fiduciary principle imposed on private law fiduciaries, it indicated when, and to what extent, a person or body would be a 'fiduciary' for the purposes of those standards. It accepted that, while 'fiduciary' could not be defined, it could be described. That description, founded on a 'legitimate expectation' test, is commonly used both in Australia and elsewhere.The third piece, "Fiduciary Reflections" was published in 2014 and contains the author's personal reflections on the course of Australian fiduciary law since the publication of Fiduciary Obligations. It suggests that, despite the clear signposts for the future development of fiduciary law given by the High Court in the 1980s, recent decisions of subordinate Australian courts seem to be heading, unnecessarily, in the opposite direction. Now at risk are the coherence of fiduciary law and its rationale.* Click here for information on our title Finn's Law: An Australian Justice edited by Tim Bonyhady.From the Book Launch Fiduciary Obligations and Finn's Law, address by The Hon Keith Mason AC QC, 9 February 2017..."Fiduciary Obligations comes with a modern Introductory Comment by Paul himself, a Preface by Sir Anthony Mason, and the reproduction of two of Paul's many extra-judicial contributions on the topic. These are an article on The Fiduciary Principle that first appeared in 1989 and another, called Fiduciary Reflections, that was published in 2014. The latter tracks developments in Paul's thinking and scholarship on this topic over the past 40 years as well as its reception into law. ... Together, these two books will enable the discerning academic or practitioner to survey large swathes of law. The eminence of the various contributors allows us to be sure that we are shown where the law has come from, where it is going, and where the law in Australia is converging or diverging from that of overseas. Each book shows what vast strides have been made in the coherent understanding of legal and equitable principles, the magnetic interplay between statutory and judge-made law, and the convergence of public and private law discourse that has taken place in the 46 years since Paul Finn first slipped shyly into postgraduate studies at London University." Read Launch Speech...