The Origins of the Trust

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.