Equity & Trusts

What Is a Trust? A trust is a legal arrangement in which property is held and managed by one person for the benefit of another. The person who creates the trust is generally called the settlor, grantor, or trustor. The person who holds and manages the trust property is the Read more

Equitable Defenses: Clean Hands, Laches, Estoppel, and Other Bars to Relief A person may have a valid legal claim and still be denied equitable relief. This is one of the defining characteristics of equity. Because equitable remedies are discretionary and historically developed to provide relief when ordinary legal remedies were Read more

Equitable Remedies: Injunctions, Specific Performance, and Other Relief When a person’s legal rights have been violated, money is often the most familiar form of judicial relief. A court may award damages to compensate for an injury or loss. But money is not always capable of adequately protecting a legal right Read more

The Maxims of Equity The maxims of equity are traditional principles that developed alongside the equitable jurisdiction of the English Court of Chancery. They expressed recurring ideas about when equitable relief should be granted, how a person seeking equity should behave, and how courts should exercise equitable discretion. Among the Read more

Equity and Common Law: Differences, History, and Relationship Common law and equity are two foundational traditions of the Anglo-American legal system. They developed separately in medieval and early modern England, served different institutional and remedial functions, and eventually became deeply integrated in the United States. Although modern American courts generally Read more

What Is Equity in Law? Equity is a body of legal principles, doctrines, and remedies developed to address situations in which the ordinary rules or remedies of common law were inadequate to provide complete relief. Historically, equity arose in England alongside the common-law courts and became associated with the Court Read more

All the Ways Law Understands the Term Equity The concept of equity is one of the richest and most multifaceted terms in legal thought. Unlike technical terms that bear a single, fixed definition, equity straddles diverse fields of law—jurisprudence, private law, public law, and even comparative constitutional discourse—where it assumes Read more

The Doctrine of Unclean Hands: A Pillar of Equity and Its Modern Relevance The legal doctrine of unclean hands—often encapsulated in the maxim “he who comes into equity must come with clean hands”—stands as a testament to the moral underpinnings of equitable jurisprudence. Though not codified in statutory law, this Read more

Laches: A Legal Concept of Equity and Temporal Justice I. Introduction The doctrine of laches is a principle of equity law rooted in the maxim “Equity aids the vigilant, not those who slumber on their rights.” Distinct from statutory limitation periods, laches is a common law defense that bars a Read more