Nothing Ties the Money to the Object: Remedies for breach of a noncharitable purpose trust under the Uniform Trust Code

A noncharitable purpose trust is never beneficiary-less as to its fund. It is beneficiary-less only as to its purpose. Under the Uniform Trust Code the person who takes that fund on failure is the person who may release the trustee’s liability to him and to whom the trustee’s duty runs, because section 409 validated the arrangement and left Article 10 as it found it: a breach is the violation of a duty owed to a beneficiary, liability runs to the beneficiaries affected, release is a beneficiary’s act, and the limitation period runs from a report to a beneficiary. Six enacted régimes are read against it: Cayman, the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, Jersey, Guernsey, and Scotland’s uncommenced 2024 Act. Between them they have written exclusive enforcer standing, an Attorney General on a ninety-day clock, a fiduciary enforcer barred from trusteeship, cy-près powers in four, and a supervisor whose remedies the deed cannot cut down. Not one ties the money to the object: none states a measure referred to the object’s condition, and where a statute does direct a recovery it sends it into the fund that passes on failure. Nor does any bar the enforcer from forgiving the trustee’s liability to him. One provision is proposed, sited in the remedial article, with the American models for it.