Newcastle University

Pre Requisite Comment

N/A

Co Requisite Comment

N/A

Aims

1) To develop knowledge and understanding of the fundamental principles of the equity, with a focus on the law of express and constructive trusts, including trust and fiduciary duties.

2) To understand the use of the trust in its original social context and in the modern context, both domestic and commercial.

3) To understand how the trust operates and how it must operate within these constraints.

4) To develop critical views on the aims, approaches and doctrine equity takes.

Outline Of Syllabus

Introduction – What is equity; equity as assisting the common law

Formal and substantive requirements to constitute and administer the different types of trust (including the three certainties and the beneficiary principle and its exceptions, i.e. various purpose trusts)

The nature and purpose of fiduciary duties

Remedies against intermeddlers with trusts

The constructive trust over the family home (with a small section on resulting trusts)

Intended Knowledge Outcomes

By the end of this module, students will be able to demonstrate:

1) a deep and critical understanding of the rules, principles and purposes of the syllabus topics (black-letter analysis), including how themes recur in different topics and how related doctrines and principles fit together ('coherence'); and

2) a critical appreciation of the transformation of those subjects for the modern age.

Intended Skill Outcomes

Legal skills

Legal problem solving: The ability to identify issues and apply the relevant principles and rules. The ability to match legal concepts to these principles to better apply them. The ability to distinguish material and immaterial differences. The ability to identify the information required to solve a problem, present and absent. The ability to work through from the raw information to a final answer or series of alternatives and to narrow the issues. The ability to make reasoned judgments based on the logic of the law and the plausibility of any choices.

Legal evaluation: The ability to identify issues and arguments. The ability to assess the (differing) effect of legal frameworks. The ability to evaluate the legal rules, principles and arguments against their policy or other objectives. The ability to synthesize different arguments. The ability to adopt and defend a position and to critique a counter-position.


Wider application: The ability to relate the legal issues to both commercial decisions and to policy-making.

Communication: The ability to write or present otherwise matters in clear and structured argument.


Research: The ability to identify legal and other issues and identify and retrieve relevant materials from primary and secondary sources.


Cognitive skills

Application: The ability to apply knowledge learned and comprehended to new situations and determine the consequences of the present or proposed law on new fact patterns or to policy questions.


Analysis: The ability to identify the relevant issues and the corresponding concepts and order them by importance.


Synthesis: The ability to identify common and competing positions or concepts and to understand when such matters align with, or diverge from, the legal issues, principles and rules.


Evaluation: The ability to identify the rational consequences of competing arguments or solutions and the extent of their differences.


Critical judgment: The ability to weigh up the merits or validity of competing arguments, allegations, consequences or similar matters.

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

Lecturing will be used to provide an overview of both matters that need to be known in outline (where little further reading is required) and also matters that need to be known in detail, where it must be followed up with self-study from textbook chapters and academic articles.

Self-study is critical in order for the learner to grasp the detail and to spend time considering the material in depth and working through problems and constructing arguments at a slow enough pace for deep learning.

Seminars focus on checking the effectiveness of that self-study, where learners can check they have understood the material properly, clear up misunderstandings and explore, in discussion, the further possibilities from where they have got to.

Learners should close the feedback loop by reconsidering the seminar material they have not fully understood or completed after a seminar in further self-study.

Five study cycles (= seminars) are required to meet the knowledge and skills objectives. With only 20 credits it is difficult to fit in sufficient different topics to meet the knowledge objectives of recurrent themes and coherence and thus the skills, particularly synthesis and evaluation, that are only developed with such knowledge objectives. Topic 1 is shorter in order to fit in with timetabling constraints. Without this 'extra' seminar above the normal four this would not be possible in Equity and Trusts.

Drop-in / surgery / office / feedback, guidance and consultation hours are a facility for another way of closing the feedback loop. Here, individual feedback and discussion is provided for matters there was insufficient time to deal with in a seminar, or where the issue was specific to a minority of learners such that the seminar had to more on.

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

The assessed essay provides an opportunity to demonstrate research, writing and the analytical, synthetical, critical and evaluation skills. It requires the students to spend longer deepening their understanding and making connections across related doctrines and norms. It requires examination of how these norms and doctrines can or might work together in harmony or in tension. It requires the identification of how one constrains another, or how a change in one changes another. Such matters require considerable development of their ideas across a long period of time.

At a basic level, examination provides the opportunity to demonstrate achievement of the knowledge-based outcomes of the syllabus. It also precludes, for the most part, skipping large parts of the module and even cheating. But memorisation is a lesser objective. More important is that examination provides: (i) the opportunity to demonstrate problem solving skills; and (ii) mental agility: the ability to juggle and manipulate a (necessarily limited) number of concepts held at one's fingertips, 'thinking on one's feet', making connections with limited resources/materials and 'responding to productive pressure'. There are very important skills to lawyers. Moreover, problem solving inherently requires a limited amount of time. Too much time, and the examination no longer measures problem solving ability, but instead a student's brute-force persistence in coming up with possibilities and weighing them up. Allowing too much time for such questions sends the wrong signal to students, that one needs not have the concepts at one's fingertips, but instead can simply look up the basics as and when they are needed. This dissuades them from developing the skills we want to inculcate, and inhibits their intellectual growth.

As noted in the assessment framework, the use of a low-stakes summative assessment can be more beneficial than a formative assessment, hence the arrangement. The students are incentivised to complete it because it carries weight through to the finals, but not so much weight that it can be highly damaging if things go wrong. Thus its feedback element is a big reason for this arrangement.

General Notes

N/A