In addition to facilitating gratuitous transfers, trusts play a major role in commercial transactions. These “business trusts” are the preferred form of organization for mutual funds (which hold more than $16 trillion) and are commonly used in asset securitization (an industry worth in excess of $1 trillion), employee pension and retirement accounts (which hold more than $24 trillion), and real estate investment trusts (which comprise over thirty firms on the S&P 500). Until recently, however, there has been little scholarly interest in business trusts, perhaps because they fall in a curricular gap between trusts and estates (where the primary focus is gratuitous transfers) and business associations (where the primary focus is the corporation and partnership). Building off of recent scholarship, this panel will begin to address this gap in the literature by presenting cutting-edge scholarship on business trusts of all types
Business meeting at program conclusion.