Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
BOOK REVIEW - EQUITY AND ADMINISTRATION
Julius Grower
University College London
EQUITY AND ADMINISTRATION. Edited by PG Turner, University Lecturer and Fellow of St Catherine’s College, University of Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2016) lix and 526 pp, plus 14 pp Index. ISBN: 9781107142732. Hardback £74.99.
Good dinner parties present both opportunities and traps. This is especially true for those, like me, who drink. It was thus with all the impetuousness of youth that I lately asked some scholarly dining companions: “Where are all the new Equity books? Tunc non eram qualis sum nunc: I was not then as I am now. A sobering reply came the next day, by email. “The question is well asked”, it said, “but it has a partial answer.” So it is with some humility that I am pleased to review this book.
Equity and Administration is an edited collection of 12 papers, each accompanied by a shorter chapter of commentary from a different author. Its main conceit is simple, but also praiseworthily ambitious. Elegantly explained by Turner, its editor, it is that: Equity is best understood as existing to address “a range of practical problems regarding the administration of deliberately created schemes for the management of others’ affairs” (p iii).
In contrast to something like the long-established “good man” theory of Equity then, the view of the jurisdiction taken by this volume is a facilitative one. Useful though it may be, the “good man” theory is merely negative. It explains Equity’s role of “mitigating the rigours of the Common Law” by emphasising those circumstances in which the otherwise lawful exercise of legal rights and powers may not be undertaken. However, to do full justice to Lord Cowper LC’s notion that “[it] is the office of Equity to support and protect the Common Law”, we must take seriously his proviso that, while it “qualifies, moderates, and reforms the rigour, hardness, and edge of the law … [Equity] does also assist the law where it is defective and weak” (Dudley v Dudley (1705) Prec Ch 241, 244; 24 ER 118, 119 (emphasis added)). This is what Equity and Administration tries to do and it is more or less successful in that endeavour.
As the concept of “administration”—or “the management of affairs” (p.16)—is a broad one, the scope of this collection is, intriguingly, not limited to that part of Equity which covers the law of trusts, or, indeed, to that part of it which relates to “private transactions” (p.3). Thus, while its first few chapters are on trusts, this book also considers other (strictly) private law issues—such as Equity’s role in the distribution of an insolvent estate—and a number of public/private, and even purely public law issues, too. Chapter 20, for instance, which is a real highlight, is on Equity and human rights. Chapter 16, written by Gummow, focuses on the significance of Equitable remedies
186