The Origins of the Trust

About the Book

Frederic W. Maitland, the pre-eminent Anglo-American legal historian, said that the trust "perhaps forms the most distinctive achievement of English lawyers. It seems to us almost essential to civilization and yet there is nothing quite like it in foreign law." This book is an updating of Maitland’s work, first looking at his suggested “foreign” sources for the trust—Roman law, German (Salic) law , and Franciscan “law”. It then considers a source Maitland did not – Islamic law – and finds that the Islamic waqf is not only “quite like” the trust, but predated it by at least five hundred years.

About the Author

After receiving his law degree from Yale, Gilbert Paul Verbit has been a law clerk to a Federal Appellate judge, a Fulbright Scholar, Legal Advisor to the Foreign Ministry of Tanzania, a Senior Research Associate at Columbia Law School, a Director of the International Legal Center in New York and Professor of Law at Boston University specializing in the law of trusts. Following his retirement from teaching Professor Verbit settled in Cambridge (U.K.) where he is presently engaged in translating a ninth century Arabic treatise on the law of trusts.