General seminar arrangements in 2025

  • WISER's TRUST seminar is hosted on-line every Wednesday afternoon at 16:00 - 17:00 SA during the teaching semester | For information about WISER's PLANT LIVES seminar, please follow this link.
  • Please register on Zoom in advance of the meeting on this link.
  • Participants must should please read the paper prior to the seminar, which is typically available by the Friday preceding the seminar.

Maitland and the unification of the theory of trust

Wednesday, 16 April, 2025 - 16:00

Presented by : 

Keith
Breckenridge

Drawing out the competing legal models for the development of trust from Henry Maine and FW Maitland, this paper shows that while almost all of the English-speaking countries followed the path of self-regulated fiduciaries mapped out by Maitland; South Africa (and the rest of the African continent) followed Maine’s despotic paternalism. Trust law in the European and Latin American civil law traditions took a third route, dominated by notarial law and self-regulated professional notaries. The paper explains the influence of and problems with the “leap of faith” argument about trust that has dominated the social sciences since Georg Simmel.

WISER Research Theme: 
Trust