Lawful Trust Purposes

Chapter 13 develops the fifth and final substantive element of trust creation: the requirement that the trust pursue a lawful purpose. UTC § 404; Restatement (Third) of Trusts § 27. Chapters 9–12 fixed the manifestation, the settlor's capacity, the res, and the ascertainable beneficiaries; the present chapter fixes the design according to which the trustee is to hold the res and apply it to the beneficiaries. It states the purpose requirement in its doctrinal form; identifies the four categories of purpose defect — illegality, contravention of public policy, impossibility, and impracticability — that render a purpose unlawful; develops the private/charitable distinction as a purpose distinction with different validity criteria on each side; treats the modern American treatment of restrictive conditions on marriage, religion, and race, and the doctrinal position of Shelley v. Kraemer and its progeny in the trust context; develops the doctrines of partial invalidity and severance under UTC § 404 and Restatement (Third) § 66; and states the modern American responses of equitable deviation and cy pres by which purposes rendered impossible or impracticable are adapted rather than abandoned. Each section states not only what the requirement forbids but why the law demands that every trust be dedicated to a legally cognizable objective.

Master Research Dossier v1.1, §4 (Institutional Analysis — lawful purpose as the validity requirement completing the five-element architecture; the enforcement rationale of the beneficiary principle re-expressed at the purpose level; the four categories of purpose defect; equitable deviation and cy pres as the modern American responses to non-illegality defects); §2 (Authority Analysis — Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948) (state action; judicial enforcement of racially restrictive covenants); In re Estate of Wilson, 59 N.Y.2d 461 (1983) (educational charitable trust and gender restrictions; state-action analysis); Estate of Feinberg, 235 Ill. 2d 256 (2009) (religious-restriction beneficiary conditions in private trusts); the Girard Trust litigation, Pennsylvania v. Board of Directors of City Trusts, 353 U.S. 230 (1957) and 357 U.S. 570 (1958) (racial restriction in charitable trust; cy pres as remedy)); §7 (Treatise Analysis — Scott & Ascher §§ 29.1–29.16, Bogert & Hess §§ 211–221, Restatement (Third) §§ 27–29, 66, Loring & Rounds ch. 9); §10 (Authority Matrix — UTC §§ 404 (lawful, not contrary to public policy, and possible to achieve), 405 (charitable purposes), 412 (modification or termination because of unanticipated circumstances or inability to administer trust effectively); Restatement (Third) §§ 27 (purposes for which trusts may be created), 28 (charitable purposes), 29 (purposes prohibited by rule of law or public policy), 66 (partial invalidity)); §11 (Discrepancy Register — the modern American doctrinal treatment of racially restrictive charitable trusts after Shelley and Wilson; the differential treatment of religious and marital conditions in private versus charitable trusts; the doctrinal boundary between purpose defects and pure beneficiary-designation defects treated in Chapter 12).

• Uniform Trust Code §§ 404 (lawful purposes), 405 (charitable purposes), 412 (modification or termination because of unanticipated circumstances) (2000, as amended)
• Restatement (Third) of Trusts §§ 27, 28, 29, 66 (2003–2012)
• Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948)
• Pennsylvania v. Board of Directors of City Trusts (Girard I), 353 U.S. 230 (1957); (Girard II), 357 U.S. 570 (1958)
• In re Estate of Wilson, 59 N.Y.2d 461, 452 N.E.2d 1228 (1983)
• Estate of Feinberg, 235 Ill. 2d 256, 919 N.E.2d 888 (2009)
• Scott & Ascher, The Law of Trusts (5th ed.) §§ 29.1–29.16
• Bogert, Bogert & Hess, The Law of Trusts and Trustees (3d ed.) §§ 211–221
• Loring & Rounds, A Trustee's Handbook ch. 9 (annual)

• Chapter 9 — Manifestation of Intent to Create a Trust (the constitutive act of which purpose is a content element)
• Chapter 11 — Trust Property (The Res) (the object to which the purpose attaches)
• Chapter 12 — Ascertainable Beneficiaries (the enforcement rationale extended at the purpose level)
• Chapter 14 — Formalities for Inter Vivos Trusts (the mode in which lawful purpose is expressed)
• Chapter 19 — Private and Charitable Trusts (charitable purposes at doctrinal depth)
• Chapters 20–21 — Resulting Trusts; Constructive Trusts (remedial consequences of purpose failure)

Chapter 13, as the concluding doctrinal chapter within Part Four (Creation), develops a reduced Part set under the Canonical Treatise Architecture: Part I (Foundations, in its doctrinal-institutional aspect — purpose as a validity requirement); Part II (Legal Nature, at doctrinal depth — the categories of lawful and unlawful purpose); Part III (Creation, at doctrinal depth — the private/charitable purpose distinction and the treatment of restrictive conditions); and Part IX (Defenses / Corrective Doctrines, at doctrinal depth — partial invalidity, equitable deviation, and cy pres). The remaining Parts are omitted rather than fabricated.

• Part IV (Operation) — omitted. The administration of purpose is reserved to Volume II.
• Part V (Transfer) — omitted. Reserved to Volume II.
• Part VI (Rights and Duties) — omitted. Foundational treatment appears in Chapter 8.
• Part VII (Procedure) — omitted. Reserved to Volume II.
• Part VIII (Enforcement) — omitted. Foundational treatment appears in Chapters 8 and 12.
• Part X (Related Doctrines) — omitted. Cross-referenced to Chapters 19–21.
• Part XI (Practical Application) — omitted. Applied purpose litigation is reserved to Volume II.

A reader completing this chapter should be able to state the lawful-purpose requirement in its UTC § 404 and Restatement (Third) § 27 formulations; identify the four categories of purpose defect and state the doctrinal test for each; distinguish private from charitable purposes and state the validity criteria on each side; state the modern American treatment of racially restrictive conditions in the trust context in light of Shelley v. Kraemer, the Girard Trust cases, and In re Estate of Wilson; distinguish the treatment of religious and marital conditions in private trusts (Feinberg) from the treatment in charitable trusts; state the doctrine of partial invalidity and the rules of severance under Restatement (Third) § 66; and state the operation of equitable deviation and cy pres under UTC § 412 and Restatement (Third) § 66 as the modern American responses to non-illegality purpose defects. Applied purpose litigation — the drafting of tax-oriented purposes, the operation of cy pres in modern American charitable practice, and the interaction of purpose review with the settlor's continuing rights under a revocable trust — is reserved to Volume II.

The fifth of the five substantive elements of trust creation is that the trust pursue a lawful purpose. UTC § 404; Restatement (Third) of Trusts § 27. UTC § 404 states the rule in a compact affirmative: "A trust may be created only to the extent its purposes are lawful, not contrary to public policy, and possible to achieve. A trust and its terms must be for the benefit of its beneficiaries." The Restatement's formulation, at § 27, is to the same effect: a trust must have a purpose that is lawful and not contrary to public policy, and the purpose must be achievable. The purpose requirement completes the five-element architecture developed at Chapters 9–12: intent expresses the settlor's design; capacity qualifies the settlor to express it; the res supplies the object of the design; the ascertainable beneficiaries identify the persons for whose benefit the design operates; and the lawful purpose fixes the substantive content of the design itself.

The purpose requirement is a validity requirement rather than a mere evidentiary or drafting rule. The doctrinal reason is threefold. First, the trust is an equitable relationship, and equity does not lend its aid to an unlawful design; the ancient maxim that equity will do no unrighteousness is inscribed in the modern American purpose requirement as its animating principle. Second, the trust operates prospectively and continuously, and the law will not maintain an ongoing arrangement whose object is illegal, contrary to public policy, or impossible of achievement; the enforcement machinery of accounting, injunction, and specific performance would be conscripted in aid of the unlawful design. Third, the purpose requirement re-expresses at the level of substance the enforcement rationale developed at §12.02: the trust must have something the law can enforce, and the law will not enforce what the law forbids.

UTC § 404 and Restatement (Third) § 27 recognize four categories of purpose defect, each of which renders the trust wholly or partially invalid. First, the purpose may be illegal — that is, the trust may direct the trustee to accomplish an act that the substantive law of some other body of doctrine forbids. Trusts to accomplish a fraud on creditors, to defeat a spouse's elective share, to evade the criminal law, or to accomplish any other act that would be unlawful if done by the settlor directly are unlawful when done by the trustee. Restatement (Third) § 29(a). Second, the purpose may contravene public policy — that is, the trust may direct or condition distributions in a manner that, though not forbidden by any specific statute, is contrary to the settled public policy of the jurisdiction. The treatment of racially, religiously, and matrimonially restrictive conditions, developed at §§13.05–13.06 below, is the principal modern American application.

Third, the purpose may be impossible — that is, the design may be one that cannot be accomplished at all, either because the object of the disposition does not exist, or because the specified means of accomplishment are physically or legally unattainable. Fourth, the purpose may be impracticable — the intermediate category — where the design was possible at the moment of manifestation but has become impossible or unreasonably difficult by supervening circumstances, or where the design, though technically possible, cannot be accomplished without wasteful expenditure or in a manner the settlor would have countenanced. Restatement (Third) § 29(b). The impossibility and impracticability defects are, in modern American practice, the domain of equitable deviation and cy pres, developed at §§13.08–13.09 below: these doctrines are not merely remedies for purpose failure but expressions of the law's willingness to preserve the substance of the settlor's design where changed circumstances have defeated its particular expression.

A trust whose purpose is illegal is void in its unlawful application. Restatement (Third) of Trusts § 29(a). Illegality in the purpose sense is a doctrinal category with sharp boundaries: the question is not whether the settlor's motives were unworthy or whether the trust's practical effect is undesirable, but whether the substantive law of some other body of doctrine — the criminal law, the law of creditor protection, the law of matrimonial property, the tax law's anti-abuse provisions — forbids the specific act the trust directs. Trusts to accomplish tax evasion, as distinguished from tax avoidance, are illegal. Trusts to defraud existing creditors, treated in the American Uniform Voidable Transactions Act and its predecessor Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act, are void as to the defrauded creditors and voidable at their instance. Trusts to defeat a spouse's elective share, treated in modern American forced-share statutes and in Restatement (Third) of Property (Wills and Other Donative Transfers) § 9.1, are subject to statutory augmentation of the elective-share estate to include the trust property.

The doctrinal treatment of illegality often turns on the severability of the unlawful design from a lawful residuum. Where the illegal purpose is severable — where, for example, a trust directs the trustee to hold property in equal shares for the settlor's children but adds an unlawful condition to one child's share — the unlawful portion may be excised and the lawful residuum enforced. Restatement (Third) § 66; UTC § 404 ("only to the extent its purposes are lawful"). Where the illegal purpose is inseverable from the trust as a whole — where the entire disposition is designed to accomplish the unlawful act — the trust fails in its entirety, and the property returns to the settlor's estate under a resulting trust developed at Chapter 20. The doctrinal choice between severance and total failure turns on the settlor's inferred intent: would the settlor, knowing that the unlawful portion could not stand, have preferred the lawful residuum to no trust at all, or the whole trust to none?

A trust whose purpose contravenes public policy — but is not illegal in the strict sense of §13.03 — is unlawful for purposes of UTC § 404 and Restatement (Third) § 27. The public-policy category is distinctly the domain of judicial development, and its content is measured not by statute but by the settled public policy of the jurisdiction as expressed in constitutions, statutes, judicial decisions, and long-established practice. The modern American authorities identify a working catalogue of policy-contravening purposes: trusts that encourage the beneficiary's commission of a crime; trusts that induce the beneficiary to divorce, marry, or remain single; trusts that induce religious or educational choices in a manner the law regards as excessively coercive; trusts that discriminate on grounds the law regards as impermissible; and trusts whose duration or accumulation provisions run afoul of the Rule Against Perpetuities or the older rule against accumulations.

The public-policy inquiry is contextual. A condition that would be void in one jurisdiction may be enforceable in another; a condition that would fail in the charitable-trust context may be tolerated in the private-trust context; a condition that would have been unremarkable in an earlier generation may fail on modern grounds. The doctrine's animating principle is that equity refuses to be conscripted in aid of a design the law, taken as a whole, would disapprove. Two categories of contested condition dominate modern American jurisprudence — restrictions bearing on race, religion, and marriage — and are treated separately at §§13.05–13.06. Two further categories — trusts whose administrative directions or duration provisions are said to be against policy — are treated at doctrinal depth in Volume II and touched on here only as they intersect with the validity question.

The modern American treatment of racially restrictive trust purposes is dominated by three lines of authority. First, Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948), held that judicial enforcement of racially restrictive covenants constitutes state action within the Fourteenth Amendment and that a state court may not, consistently with the Equal Protection Clause, enforce such a covenant. Shelley is not itself a trust case, but its state-action rationale reaches the trust context whenever a state court is asked to enforce a purpose or condition that discriminates on constitutionally forbidden grounds. Second, the Girard Trust litigation, Pennsylvania v. Board of Directors of City Trusts, 353 U.S. 230 (1957), and 357 U.S. 570 (1958), applied Shelley to a charitable trust that limited admission to a boys' school to "poor, white, male orphans" and administered by state officials as trustees; the Supreme Court held that state administration of the discriminatory purpose was state action; the state courts, on remand, resolved the impossibility that resulted by removing the state trustees and continuing the trust with private trustees, and ultimately by cy pres modification of the restriction.

Third, In re Estate of Wilson, 59 N.Y.2d 461 (1983), applied the state-action analysis to a charitable trust for the education of male high-school graduates in a manner that made the trust unenforceable in its original terms but preserved by cy pres where the state's role in administration was excised. The doctrinal upshot for the trust context is that a racially discriminatory purpose in a private trust, though it may be enforceable between private parties, will not be enforced by a state court that would thereby engage state action within Shelley; a racially discriminatory purpose in a charitable trust, whose enforcement necessarily involves the state through the Attorney General or through public-officer trustees, is unenforceable in its original terms, and modern American doctrine responds either by removal of the state role or, more commonly, by cy pres modification of the restriction. Restatement (Third) of Trusts § 29 and the Girard Trust experience together establish the modern American rule that racially discriminatory charitable purposes cannot be given effect and must be reformed by cy pres to the extent required to save the disposition. Chapter 19 develops the charitable-trust cy pres doctrine at doctrinal depth.

Modern American doctrine treats religious and matrimonial restrictions in trusts less categorically than racial restrictions, and the doctrinal treatment differs between private and charitable settings. In private trusts, the leading modern American authority is Estate of Feinberg, 235 Ill. 2d 256 (2009), which upheld a condition that reduced or eliminated a grandchild's share upon the grandchild's marriage outside the settlor's religion. Feinberg's rationale is that the condition operated on a completed choice rather than on an ongoing life decision, and that the settlor was doing no more than declining to reward the grandchild's marriage decision through the settlor's private bounty — a species of freedom of disposition the state's public policy does not prohibit. Restatement (Third) of Trusts § 29 cmt. j accepts a comparable analysis: conditions in private trusts that seek to induce or discourage particular personal-life choices are generally enforceable unless the condition is coercive to a degree that the state will not countenance.

The traditional categories of unenforceable conditions in the private-trust setting include total restraints on marriage (a condition that the beneficiary never marry), conditions inducing divorce (a distribution conditioned on the beneficiary's obtaining a divorce), and conditions that require the abandonment of a legally recognized parental role. Restatement (Third) of Trusts § 29(c); Restatement (Second) of Property (Donative Transfers) §§ 6.1–6.3, retained by the Third Restatement in this respect. Partial restraints on marriage — including restrictions to marriage within a religion, to marriage with the settlor's approval, or to marriage after a specified age — are more commonly upheld, subject to the coercion analysis of the preceding paragraph. In charitable trusts, the state-action analysis of Wilson governs: religious restrictions of the kind that would be tolerable in a private trust may be unenforceable when applied through the machinery of state administration, and cy pres modification is often the doctrinal solution.

The third and fourth purpose defects — impossibility and impracticability — differ from illegality and public-policy contravention in that they do not condemn the settlor's design as unlawful; they merely register the fact that the design cannot be accomplished as expressed. Restatement (Third) of Trusts § 29(b); UTC § 412. A trust to educate the settlor's grandchildren at a specific school that no longer exists is impossible in its original terms; a trust to endow a hospital's operation of a specific medical technology that has become obsolete is impracticable; a trust to fund the maintenance of a building that has been condemned is impossible. The doctrinal question in each case is not whether the design is unlawful but whether the design can be accomplished — and if not, whether the underlying object of the design can be given effect through modification.

The modern American treatment of impossibility and impracticability is not to void the trust but to reform it. Two doctrines — equitable deviation, developed for administrative provisions of both private and charitable trusts under UTC § 412 and Restatement (Third) § 66, and cy pres, developed for the dispositive purposes of charitable trusts under UTC § 413 and Restatement (Third) § 67 — together supply the reformation machinery. Equitable deviation adjusts administrative provisions that have become impracticable or wasteful while preserving the settlor's dispositive design; cy pres adjusts the charitable dispositive purpose itself, redirecting the trust property to a purpose as near as possible to the settlor's original purpose. The doctrines and their coordination are developed at §13.08 below in the doctrinal framing that anticipates the fuller Volume II treatment.

Equitable deviation, codified in UTC § 412 and stated in Restatement (Third) § 66, permits a court to modify or terminate a trust — either administratively or, in appropriate cases, dispositively — because of circumstances not anticipated by the settlor if modification or termination will further the purposes of the trust. The doctrine's traditional formulation targets administrative provisions: rules governing investment, distribution timing, trustee compensation, and the mechanics of trust operation that, if left unchanged, would defeat the settlor's purposes in changed circumstances. UTC § 412(a). The Restatement's modern American formulation expands the doctrine's reach to permit dispositive modification in appropriate cases, subject to the requirement that the modification further the settlor's purposes as they can be ascertained from the trust instrument. Restatement (Third) § 66. Equitable deviation is available for both private and charitable trusts and is the routine modern American response to administrative provisions that impracticable circumstances have rendered defeating rather than facilitating of the settlor's design.

Cy pres, codified in UTC § 413 and treated at Restatement (Third) § 67, is the doctrine specific to charitable trusts. Where a particular charitable purpose becomes unlawful, impossible, impracticable, or wasteful, the court may direct that the trust property be applied to a charitable purpose as near as possible to the settlor's original charitable purpose, provided the settlor manifested a general charitable intention. UTC § 413(a). The doctrine's modern American operation is treated at doctrinal depth in Chapter 19 and at applied depth in Volume II; the point for present purposes is that cy pres and equitable deviation together supply the modern American response to purpose defects other than illegality and pure public-policy contravention. Where the defect is illegality or public-policy contravention, the disposition is void in its unlawful part and severance under Restatement (Third) § 66 salvages what remains; where the defect is impossibility or impracticability, the disposition is preserved by administrative deviation or, in the charitable-trust context, by cy pres redirection.

The private/charitable distinction is, at bottom, a purpose distinction. A private trust's purpose is to benefit ascertainable persons; a charitable trust's purpose is to benefit the community. Restatement (Third) of Trusts § 28 states the recognized charitable purposes: the relief of poverty, the advancement of knowledge or education, the advancement of religion, the promotion of health, governmental or municipal purposes, and other purposes the accomplishment of which is beneficial to the community. UTC § 405(a) states the same catalogue in substance. The distinction is doctrinally consequential in five respects: the beneficiary-principle exception of §12.06 applies only to purposes within the charitable catalogue; the Attorney General's enforcement standing arises only for charitable trusts; the Rule Against Perpetuities does not, in most jurisdictions, apply to charitable trusts; cy pres is available only for charitable trusts; and the state-action analysis of Wilson and the Girard Trust cases applies only to the extent of state involvement in the trust's administration, which is systemic for charitable trusts and episodic for private trusts.

The purpose requirement operates on each side of the distinction with its own criteria. In a private trust, the requirement asks whether the design conforms to §13.02 — that is, whether the design is lawful, not contrary to public policy, and possible to achieve — with the ascertainable-beneficiary requirement of Chapter 12 supplying the enforcement rationale. In a charitable trust, the requirement asks whether the design is within the recognized charitable catalogue of Restatement (Third) § 28 and UTC § 405, and whether within that catalogue the design is lawful, not contrary to public policy, and possible to achieve; the Attorney General supplies the enforcement rationale, and cy pres supplies the machinery for adapting the design to changed circumstances. Chapter 19 develops the private/charitable distinction at doctrinal depth, treating the charitable catalogue, the cy pres doctrine, and the coordination with modern American tax-exempt-organization law.

Where a trust contains an unlawful purpose but the unlawful portion is severable from the trust's lawful residuum, the modern American doctrine excises the unlawful portion and enforces what remains. UTC § 404 ("only to the extent its purposes are lawful"); Restatement (Third) of Trusts § 66. Severability is a question of the settlor's inferred intent, judged by the ordinary rules of construction: the court asks whether the settlor, knowing that the unlawful portion could not stand, would have preferred the lawful residuum to no trust at all. Where the inference favors severance, the trust operates in its lawful terms; where the inference favors integrity — where the unlawful portion is central to the settlor's design and the residuum is a rump the settlor would not have created independently — the trust fails in its entirety, and the property returns to the settlor's estate under a resulting trust.

The severance inquiry is closely coordinated with the impossibility/impracticability inquiry of §13.07. Where the difficulty is illegality or public-policy contravention, severance is the appropriate tool: the unlawful portion is excised; the lawful residuum, if any, is preserved; and equitable deviation and cy pres do not enter because those doctrines address defects of achievability, not of legality. Where the difficulty is impossibility or impracticability, severance is generally the wrong tool: the design is not unlawful, and the correct response is preservation through equitable deviation or, in the charitable-trust setting, through cy pres. The doctrinal distinction between severance and reformation runs along the fault line between the first two purpose defects and the second two, and its practical significance is that severance shrinks the trust while reformation preserves it.

Where the purpose requirement fails and neither severance nor reformation can save the disposition, the doctrinal consequence tracks the patterns developed at §§9.09, 10.09, 11.08, and 12.10. The purported trust does not exist; the property is held on a resulting trust for the settlor or the settlor's successors; and where wrongful conduct is proved and equity requires, a constructive trust is imposed. Restatement (Third) of Trusts § 29 cmt. h. The five validity elements share a common remedial architecture, and the failure of purpose completes the pattern. What distinguishes purpose failure from failure of the other four elements is the frequency with which the modern American doctrines of severance, equitable deviation, and cy pres intervene between diagnosis and remedy: the law is more solicitous of preserving the settlor's design where the difficulty is impossibility or impracticability than where the difficulty is a want of manifestation, capacity, res, or beneficiary.

The doctrinal pattern reflects a policy judgment: illegality and contravention of public policy are conditions on the exercise of donative freedom, and their operation is inhibitory; impossibility and impracticability are contingencies of a changing world, and their operation is facilitative. The purpose requirement, taken as a whole, both prevents the trust from being conscripted in aid of an unlawful design and preserves it from the accidents of time. The five-element architecture of trust creation, complete at the close of this chapter, is thus not a checklist of pitfalls but a coordinated statement of the conditions under which the private and charitable trust may operate — a statement that has evolved from medieval origins through equity's classical elaboration and into its modern American expression in the Restatement (Third) and the Uniform Trust Code.

A trust may be created only to the extent its purposes are lawful, not contrary to public policy, and possible to achieve. UTC § 404; Restatement (Third) of Trusts § 27.

Four categories of purpose defect render a trust unlawful: illegality, contravention of public policy, impossibility, and impracticability. Restatement (Third) § 29.

Racially discriminatory charitable purposes are unenforceable through the machinery of state administration and are typically reformed by cy pres. Shelley v. Kraemer; Girard Trust cases; In re Estate of Wilson.

Religious and marital conditions in private trusts operating on completed choices are generally enforceable; total restraints on marriage and conditions inducing divorce are not. Estate of Feinberg; Restatement (Third) § 29(c).

Impossibility and impracticability are addressed by equitable deviation (UTC § 412; Restatement (Third) § 66) and, for charitable trusts, by cy pres (UTC § 413; Restatement (Third) § 67), rather than by voidness.

The private/charitable distinction is a purpose distinction with five doctrinal consequences: the beneficiary-principle exception, Attorney General enforcement, the Rule Against Perpetuities, cy pres availability, and the state-action analysis.

Where the unlawful portion is severable and the settlor would have preferred the residuum to no trust, the lawful residuum is enforced. UTC § 404; Restatement (Third) § 66.

Purpose failure, where not saved by severance or reformation, produces a resulting trust for the settlor's successors; the constructive-trust remedy operates where equity requires. Chapters 20–21.

• Uniform Trust Code §§ 404, 405, 412, 413 (2000, as amended)
• Restatement (Third) of Trusts §§ 27, 28, 29, 66, 67 (2003–2012)
• Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948)
• Pennsylvania v. Board of Directors of City Trusts, 353 U.S. 230 (1957); 357 U.S. 570 (1958)
• In re Estate of Wilson, 59 N.Y.2d 461, 452 N.E.2d 1228 (1983)
• Estate of Feinberg, 235 Ill. 2d 256, 919 N.E.2d 888 (2009)

• Scott & Ascher, The Law of Trusts (5th ed.) §§ 29.1–29.16
• Bogert, Bogert & Hess, The Law of Trusts and Trustees (3d ed.) §§ 211–221
• Loring & Rounds, A Trustee's Handbook ch. 9 (annual)

Backward, within Volume I.

• Chapter 9 §9.01 → §13.01 (manifestation of intent; purpose as content element)
• Chapter 11 §11.01 → §13.01 (res as object of the lawful purpose)
• Chapter 12 §§12.01, 12.06 → §§13.01, 13.09 (beneficiary principle; charitable exception as purpose distinction)

Forward, within Volume I.

• §13.01 → Chapter 14 (formalities for inter vivos trusts; the mode of expressing the lawful purpose)
• §13.09 → Chapter 19 (private and charitable trusts at doctrinal depth)
• §13.11 → Chapters 20–21 (resulting and constructive trusts as remedial consequences)

Forward, to Volume II. Applied purpose doctrine — the operation of cy pres in modern American charitable practice, the coordination of purpose review with the Rule Against Perpetuities and modern accumulations rules, the tax-driven design of split-interest and private-foundation purposes, and the intersection of purpose with modern statutes on trust decanting and modification — is reserved to Volume II. Volume II presupposes the purpose framework fixed here.

Chapter 13 has fixed the fifth and final element of trust creation: the requirement that the trust pursue a lawful purpose. With Chapter 13 the five validity elements — manifestation, capacity, res, ascertainable beneficiaries, and lawful purpose — are complete, and Part Four of Volume I closes. Chapter 14 opens Part Five with the treatment of formalities for inter vivos trusts: the modes in which the settlor's manifestation of the five elements must be expressed. Where Part Four has stated the substantive content that a valid trust must have, Part Five states the formal expression that content must receive. The two parts together supply the full doctrinal account of the trust's creation, and Volume I turns from creation to the classificatory doctrines of Part Six.