Origins of the Trust

Frederic W. Maitland, the pre-eminent Anglo-American legal historian, said that the trust "e;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."e; This book is an updating of Maitlands 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.