Person:

Sitkoff, Robert

This paper considers how agency fiduciary law might be applied to a financial advisor with discretionary trading authority over a client's account. It (i) surveys the agency problem to which the fiduciary obligation is directed; (ii) examines the legal context by considering how the fiduciary obligation undertakes to mitigate this problem; and (iii) examines several potential applications of agency fiduciary law to financial advisors, including principal trades and the role of informed consent by the client, organizing the discussion under the great fiduciary rubrics of loyalty and care. This paper was sponsored by Federated Investors, Inc.

The prudent investor rule, enacted in every state over the last 30 years, is the centerpiece of fiduciary investment law. Repudiating the prior law's emphasis on avoiding risk, the rule reorients fiduciary investment toward risk management in accordance with modern portfolio theory. The rule directs trustees to implement an overall investment strategy having risk and return objectives reasonably suited to the trust. Using data from reports of bank trust holdings and fiduciary income tax returns, we examine trustee management of market risk before and after the reform. First, we find that the reform increased stock holdings only among banks with average trust account sizes above the 25th percentile. This result is consistent with sensitivity in asset allocation to beneficiary risk tolerance as proxied by account size. Second, we find that, although stockholdings increased after the reform, trust corpus did not become more correlated with the market. We explain this result in part with evidence of increased portfolio rebalancing after the reform. We conclude that the rule’s command to align market risk with beneficiary risk tolerance, and to manage market risk exposure on an ongoing basis, has largely been followed.

Perpetual trusts are an established feature of today’s estate planning firmament. Yet little-noticed provisions in the constitutions of nine states, including in five states that purport to allow perpetual trusts by statute, proscribe “perpetuities.” This Article examines those provisions in light of the meaning of “perpetuity” as a legal term of art across history. We consider the constitutionality of perpetual trust statutes in states that have a constitutional ban on perpetuities and whether courts in states with such a ban may give effect to a perpetual trust settled in another state. Because text, purpose, and history all suggest that the constitutional perpetuities bans were meant to proscribe entails, whether in form or in function, and because a perpetual trust is in purpose and in function an entail, we conclude that recognition of perpetual trusts is prohibited in states with a constitutional perpetuities ban.

This Article examines the nature, origin, and policy soundness of the tort of interference with inheritance. We argue that the tort should be repudiated because it is conceptually and practically unsound. Endorsed by the Second Restatement of Torts and recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in a recent decision, the tort has been adopted by courts in nearly half the states. But it is deeply problematic from the perspectives of both inheritance law and tort law. It undermines the core principle of freedom of disposition that undergirds American inheritance law. It invites circumvention of principled policies encoded in the specialized rules of procedure applicable in inheritance disputes. In many cases, it has displaced venerable and better-fitting causes of action for equitable relief.

This chapter restates the economic theory of fiduciary law, making several fresh contributions. First, it elaborates on earlier work by clarifying the agency problem that is at the core of all fiduciary relationships. In consequence of this common economic structure, there is a common doctrinal structure that cuts across the application of fiduciary principles in different contexts. However, within this common structure, the particulars of fiduciary obligation vary in accordance with the particulars of the agency problem in the fiduciary relationship at issue. This point explains the purported elusiveness of fiduciary doctrine. It also explains why courts apply fiduciary law both categorically, such as to trustees and (legal) agents, as well as ad hoc to relationships involving a position of trust and confidence that gives rise to an agency problem.

Second, this chapter identifies a functional distinction between primary and subsidiary fiduciary rules. In all fiduciary relationships we find general duties of loyalty and care, typically phrased as standards, which proscribe conflicts of interest and prescribe an objective standard of care. But we also find specific subsidiary fiduciary duties, often phrased as rules, that elaborate on the application of loyalty and care to commonly recurring circumstances in the particular form of fiduciary relationship. Together, the general primary duties of loyalty and care and the specific subsidiary rules provide for governance by a mix of rules and standards that offers the benefits of both while mitigating their respective weaknesses.

Finally, this chapter revisits the puzzle of why fiduciary law includes mandatory rules that cannot be waived in a relationship deemed fiduciary. Committed economic contractarians, such as Easterbrook and Fischel, have had difficulty in explaining why the parties to a fiduciary relationship do not have complete freedom of contract. The answer is that the mandatory core of fiduciary law serves a cautionary and protective function within the fiduciary relationship as well as an external categorization function that clarifies rights for third parties. The existence of a mandatory fiduciary core is thus reconcilable with an economic theory of fiduciary law.

This essay revisits the economic theory of fiduciary law. Nearly two decades have passed since the publication of the seminal economic analyses of fiduciary law by Cooter and Freedman (1991), and by Easterbrook and Fischel (1993), which together have come to underpin the prevailing economic, contractarian model of fiduciary law. The economic theory of agency that motivates those papers has come to permeate the literature on law and legal institutions generally. The law-and-economics movement has matured further, developing new tools and refining its understanding of previously applied concepts. The purpose of this essay is to restate the economic theory of fiduciary law in an updated and accessible synthesis.

The prudent investor rule, enacted in every state over the last 30 years, is the centerpiece of fiduciary investment law. Repudiating the prior law's emphasis on avoiding risk, the rule reorients fiduciary investment toward risk management in accordance with modern portfolio theory. The rule directs trustees to implement an overall investment strategy having risk and return objectives reasonably suited to the trust. Using data from reports of bank trust holdings and fiduciary income tax returns, we examine trustee management of market risk before and after the reform. First, we find that the reform increased stock holdings only among banks with average trust account sizes above the 25th percentile. This result is consistent with sensitivity in asset allocation to beneficiary risk tolerance as proxied by account size. Second, we find that, although stockholdings increased after the reform, trust corpus did not become more correlated with the market. We explain this result in part with evidence of increased portfolio rebalancing after the reform. We conclude that the rule’s command to align market risk with beneficiary risk tolerance, and to manage market risk exposure on an ongoing basis, has largely been followed.

The Trusts and Estates course is about the law of gratuitous transfers at death, that is, the law of succession. Lately such courses have come to cover both probate succession by will and intestacy, and non-probate succession by inter vivos trust, pay-on-death contract, and other such will substitutes. The organizing principle of the American law of succession, both probate and non-probate, is freedom of disposition. My suggestion in this essay, which I have implemented in my Trusts and Estates class and in the casebook for which I am the surviving co-author, is that the Trusts and Estates course can likewise be organized around this principle. The Trusts and Estates course is perhaps best conceptualized as a survey of the law and policy of implementing freedom of disposition. (This essay was prepared for the Teaching Trusts and Estates special issue of the St. Louis University Law Journal.)

The theme of this essay, a commentary on two papers forthcoming in the same volume on “The Worlds of the Trust,” is that trust law is not a species of property law or contract law, but rather is a species of organizational law. Organizational law supplies a set of contractarian rules, some of a fiduciary character, that provide for the governance of the organization. These are the rules that provide for the powers and duties of the managers and the rights of the beneficial owners. Organizational law also supplies a set of proprietary rules that provide for asset partitioning. These are the rules that provide for the separation of the property of the organization from the property of the organization’s managers, beneficial owners, and other insiders. Classifying trust law as organizational law removes the tension between the contractarian governance and the proprietary asset partitioning features of trust law.

This article reports the results of an empirical study of the effect of the new prudent investor rule on asset allocation by institutional trustees. Using federal banking data spanning 1986 through 1997, the authors find that, after adoption of the new prudent investor rule, institutional trustees held about 1.5 to 4.5 percentage points more stock at the expense of "safe" investments. This shift to stock amounts to a 3 to 10 percent increase in stock holdings and accounts for roughly 10 to 30 percent of the over-all increase in stock holdings in the period under study. The authors conclude that the adoption of the new prudent investor rule had a significant effect on trust asset allocation.