Another outing for equity’s magic wand

English v Keats [2018] EWHC 637 (Ch)

The recent judgment in English v Keats [2018] EWHC 637 (Ch) is a vivid illustration of the magical power of equity to rewrite history and make counterfactuals real. Not only can decisions actually taken by fiduciaries in breach of duty sometimes be reversed but, conversely, in equity’s universe, acts which never really happened can be made to have occurred. An example of the latter phenomenon is equity’s jurisdiction to aid the defective execution of a power on display in Re English. Quite separately, the case also ventilated some interesting issues of proprietary estoppel.