Wahler, The Problem of Charitable Trust Enforcement

Morgan Wahler has published The Problem of Charitable Trust Enforcement: Addressing the Insufficiencies of the Attorney General System and Proposing New Law Reform, 48 ACTEC Law Journal 361 (2023) (subscription required).  The paper won the ACTEC Foundation’s Mary Moers Wenig student writing competition last year. From the introduction:

This article focuses on [a] problem that arises in special ways with respect to charitable trusts – the mechanism for their oversight and enforcement. First, this article analyzes the current system of charitable trust enforcement, namely, who has standing to sue for enforcement. Next, this article explores the limitations innate to the current structure and stresses the urgency with which the current system must be modified through the use of two examples of breach of trust. The article concludes that to address the immense agency costs and overall inefficiencies of the current enforcement scheme, the settlors of charitable trusts should be permitted to name a trust enforcer; and if they fail to do so, courts should be obliged to appoint one.

Lloyd Mayer