Drafting Trusts and Will Trusts:
A Modern Approach, 8th edn
Price £117 Hardback, ISBN 0-421-88040-6
Plus CD Rom.
The previous edition was reviewed in Trusts & Trustees, Volume 11, Issue 4, and follows the principles of previous editions. Now we are offered the 8th edition of this modern classic.
The Plain English Campaign, founded in 1979, fights for public information to be written in plain English. Strangely, it believes that all public documents should be written so that the intended audience can read, understand and act on them at a single reading. How successful that campaign is being remains to be seen. Allegedly a simpler form of UK tax legislation shall make tax law more comprehensible. This, again, is something which remains to be seen. However, as Albert Einstein once said: “If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well.”
However, the push for plainer English and greater transparency has gained wide support in the United States. It supports the need for greater transparency and the Australian Parliament, three years ago, published its Plain English Manual for drafting legislation. The campaign has not caught on everywhere. The Scottish Executive has resisted calls for plainer English on the basis that legal precision is vital. And this represents the conflict relating to plain English.
Is plainer English less ambiguous than an obscure precision?
As far as plain English and drafting trusts and will trusts is concerned, the modern approach is well represented by James Kessler in his now almost annual version of his well-known text book.
The first edition of this book appeared in 1992. It was originally 11 chapters, now expanded to over 30 whilst maintaining the aim of the work to give the drafter discussion of all the issues which arise in drafting will settlements and will trusts and to provide precedents. A CD Rom accompanies this book with those precedents.
The annual UK Finance Act is a great stimulator requiring change in the drafting as well as other judicial developments of trusts. The Finance Act 2006 has been a fertile source for revision. This dominance of UK taxation illustrates that the book follows the English law and taxation. The natural development is to prepare specialist versions for other trust jurisdictions. Already editions in Canada and Northern Ireland have been published and many others are due. A current latest version is the one on Cayman Islands produced in conjunction with Tony Pursall (see subsequently).
James Kessler’s book is widely praised: it deserves to be and its value extends from an essential library purchase to what could be what any trust lawyer would like for Christmas!
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Drafting Trusts and Will Trusts and other books by James Kessler.