Prudent Administration

1. Prudent administration is the governing standard of care for every fiduciary act of the trustee. UTC § 804; Restatement (Third) of Trusts § 77.
2. Prudence is measured in light of the purposes, terms, distributional requirements, and circumstances of the particular trust — not by hindsight, personal preference, or comparison to unrelated trusts.
3. The prudent-person standard requires reasonable care, reasonable skill, and reasonable caution; each element is a distinct component and each must be satisfied.
4. Prudence and loyalty are companion duties: loyalty defines whose interests are served; prudence defines the quality with which they are served.
5. Prudence does not guarantee success. A trustee is not an insurer; she is a fiduciary evaluated by the quality of her process, not the outcome of her decisions.
6. Trustee conduct is evaluated at the time decisions are made, on the information reasonably available then, and without the benefit of hindsight. Restatement (Third) § 77 cmt. a; UPIA § 8.
7. Good faith is a necessary but not sufficient element of prudence; a well-intentioned trustee who fails to exercise reasonable care, skill, or caution breaches the duty.
8. Prudence in administration is distinct from prudence in investment: administrative prudence governs every fiduciary act, while investment prudence is codified in the Uniform Prudent Investor Act.
9. Documentation of deliberation is the trustee's principal institutional protection against later challenge; the record made contemporaneously is the record the court will review.
10. Remedies for imprudent administration include surcharge for resulting loss, denial or reduction of compensation, injunction, and — in serious cases — removal. UTC §§ 706, 1001–1002.

Upon completing this chapter, the reader should be able to:

1. State the doctrinal content of the duty of prudent administration under UTC § 804 and Restatement (Third) § 77.
2. Articulate the three elements of the prudent-person standard — reasonable care, reasonable skill, and reasonable caution — and give an example of each.
3. Distinguish prudent administration from the duty of loyalty and the duty of impartiality.
4. Explain why prudence does not guarantee success and identify the doctrinal consequence of that principle.
5. Evaluate trustee conduct at the time a decision was made without recourse to hindsight.
6. Distinguish prudence in administration from prudence in investment and situate the Uniform Prudent Investor Act within the broader duty.
7. Analyze the elements of a prudent decision-making process: identification of the question, gathering of information, deliberation, and documentation.
8. Assess a decision under judicial review, allocating burdens of proof and applying the correct standard.
9. Identify remedies for breach and select the appropriate remedy on a given fact pattern.
10. Diagnose common misconceptions concerning prudent administration — most importantly the equation of prudence with success.

• Uniform Trust Code § 804 (prudent administration); § 105 (default and mandatory rules); § 706 (removal); § 708 (compensation); §§ 1001–1002 (remedies; damages); § 1008 (exculpation).
• Restatement (Third) of Trusts §§ 77 (prudent administration), 76 (duty to administer), 78 (loyalty), 79 (impartiality), 90 (prudent investor rule), 100 (liability for breach).
• Restatement (Second) of Trusts §§ 174 (duty of care and skill), 227 (investment).
• Uniform Prudent Investor Act §§ 1–9 (1994), esp. § 2 (standard of care) and § 8 (evaluation as of time of decision).
• Leading state trust statutes implementing UTC § 804: Cal. Prob. Code § 16040; Fla. Stat. § 736.0804; N.Y. Est. Powers & Trusts Law § 11-2.3(b); Tex. Prop. Code § 117.004; Ohio Rev. Code § 5808.04; Va. Code § 64.2-766.
• Landmark decisions: Harvard College v. Amory, 26 Mass. (9 Pick.) 446 (1830) (foundational prudent-person rule); In re Bank of New York, 35 N.Y.2d 512 (1974); In re Estate of Janes, 90 N.Y.2d 41 (1997); Wood v. U.S. Bank, N.A., 828 N.E.2d 1072 (Ohio Ct. App. 2005); In re Trust Created by Inman, 693 N.W.2d 514 (Neb. 2005); Estate of Beach, 15 Cal. 3d 623 (1975).

• Austin Wakeman Scott, William Franklin Fratcher & Mark L. Ascher, Scott and Ascher on Trusts (5th ed.) § 17 (duty of care and skill).
• George Gleason Bogert, George Taylor Bogert & Amy Morris Hess, The Law of Trusts and Trustees (3d ed. & Supp.) §§ 541, 612 (prudent administration).
• Charles E. Rounds Jr. & Charles E. Rounds III, Loring and Rounds: A Trustee's Handbook (current ed.), ch. 6 (duty of prudence).
• Robert H. Sitkoff & Jesse Dukeminier, Wills, Trusts, and Estates (11th ed.), chapters on the prudent-investor rule and fiduciary administration.
• Edward C. Halbach Jr., Trust Investment Law in the Third Restatement, 77 Iowa L. Rev. 1151 (1992).
• John H. Langbein, The Uniform Prudent Investor Act and the Future of Trust Investing, 81 Iowa L. Rev. 641 (1996).
• Restatement (Third) of Trusts, Reporter's Notes to §§ 77 and 90.
• ACTEC Commentaries on Trustee Fiduciary Duties (current edition).

Chapter 6 examined the trustee's fundamental duty to administer the trust; Chapters 7 and 8 examined the substantive duties of loyalty and impartiality. Chapter 9 turns to the duty of prudence, which supplies the quality with which every fiduciary act must be performed. UTC § 804; Restatement (Third) of Trusts § 77. Where loyalty answers whose interests the trustee serves, and impartiality answers how she balances the several interests she serves, prudence answers how well she must serve them.

Prudence is the operational standard of care applicable to every aspect of trust administration — investment, distribution, communication, record-keeping, delegation, and the whole spectrum of decisions the office demands. It is not a discrete duty triggered by particular acts; it is the standard by which all acts are measured. A trustee may satisfy loyalty and impartiality yet still breach the trust by administering it imprudently.

The doctrinal statement is direct. UTC § 804 provides: "A trustee shall administer the trust as a prudent person would, by considering the purposes, terms, distributional requirements, and other circumstances of the trust. In satisfying this standard, the trustee shall exercise reasonable care, skill, and caution." Restatement (Third) § 77 states the rule in Restatement form. Both formulations locate prudence in the character of the trust itself, not in an abstract measure of what any prudent person might do in general.

The most consequential feature of UTC § 804 is its insistence that prudence be measured by the purposes, terms, distributional requirements, and other circumstances of the particular trust. A course of action that would be prudent for one trust may be imprudent for another. A liquidity posture that is prudent for a trust with imminent mandatory distributions is imprudent for a long-term dynasty trust; an investment concentration that is imprudent for a small support trust may be tolerable for a large trust with express settlor authorization.

Prudence is thus contextual and trust-specific. The trustee is not evaluated by what an abstract reasonable fiduciary would do in the abstract; she is evaluated by what a reasonable fiduciary would do administering this trust for these beneficiaries under these circumstances. The statutory adjective "reasonable" — attached to care, skill, and caution — imports the same trust-specific measure.

The corollary is that prudence is not personal preference. A trustee who administers the trust according to her own view of what is wise, without reference to the settlor's purposes or the beneficiaries' circumstances, misapplies the standard. Prudence is a duty of fidelity to the trust, not a license for the trustee's individual judgment.

The American prudent-person rule descends from Harvard College v. Amory, 26 Mass. (9 Pick.) 446 (1830). The court there rejected a categorical list of permitted trust investments in favor of a flexible standard: "All that can be required of a trustee to invest, is that he shall conduct himself faithfully and exercise a sound discretion. He is to observe how men of prudence, discretion and intelligence manage their own affairs, not in regard to speculation, but in regard to the permanent disposition of their funds, considering the probable income, as well as the probable safety of the capital to be invested." That formulation supplied the doctrinal seed from which modern prudence law grew.

The nineteenth-century rule was eclipsed for much of the twentieth century by legal-list statutes and by narrow judicial glosses that treated concentration or unconventional investments as per se imprudent. The Restatement (Second) of Trusts § 227 preserved a stricter formulation of the prudent-person rule that, in some jurisdictions, was read as forbidding portfolio-level reasoning in favor of investment-by-investment scrutiny. The doctrinal shortcomings of that approach — most importantly its inability to accommodate modern portfolio theory — prompted reform.

The Uniform Prudent Investor Act (1994) modernized the doctrine of investment prudence. It replaced the investment-by-investment focus with a portfolio-level standard, permitted delegation on reasonable terms, and instructed courts to evaluate investment decisions in the context of the trust's overall investment strategy. UPIA §§ 2, 3, 9. The Act is now enacted, with variations, in the great majority of American jurisdictions.

UTC § 804, adopted six years later, extended the modernizing move beyond investment. Its language — reasonable care, skill, and caution, applied to the administration of the trust in light of its purposes, terms, and circumstances — captures the substance of the prudent-investor formulation and generalizes it to every fiduciary act. The UTC comment makes the linkage explicit: § 804 states the general duty of prudent administration; UPIA supplies the specific rules for investment prudence within that duty. See UTC § 804 cmt.

The Restatement (Third) of Trusts §§ 77 and 90 harmonize the general and investment-specific duties in Restatement form. The three sources — UTC § 804, UPIA, and Restatement (Third) §§ 77 and 90 — together supply the modern American doctrine of prudent trust administration.

The prudent-person standard, as stated in UTC § 804 and Restatement (Third) § 77, requires that the trustee administer the trust as a prudent person would under the circumstances. The referent is not the trustee's own habits, nor an idealized fiduciary from another era, but a reasonable person acting with the responsibility of a trustee in the position of the trustee under review. The standard is objective; the trustee's subjective good intentions are relevant but not dispositive.

A trustee holding herself out as having special skills — a corporate fiduciary, a professional trustee, an attorney or accountant acting as trustee — is held to a higher standard corresponding to those skills. UTC § 806; Restatement (Third) § 77(3). The doctrine does not raise the standard to that of an insurer, but it does prevent a professional trustee from claiming refuge in a lay standard.

The adjective "reasonable," attached to each of care, skill, and caution, is the measure by which the standard is applied. Reasonableness is not defined further in the statute for the same reason that it is not defined further in tort law: it is a standard, not a rule, and its content is supplied by the facts of the case measured against the character of the trust and the office.

Reasonableness supplies both the ceiling and the floor. The trustee is not required to attain perfection; she is required to act as a reasonable fiduciary in her position would act. Nor is she permitted to claim shelter in generalized good faith; she must attain the reasonableness the office demands. UTC § 1008 (exculpation clauses cannot relieve the trustee of liability for breach committed in bad faith or with reckless indifference to the purposes of the trust or the interests of the beneficiaries).

Reasonable care is the diligence, attention, and thoroughness that a reasonable fiduciary would bring to the administration of a trust of this character. It is a duty of active engagement with the affairs of the trust: knowing the trust's assets, purposes, and beneficiaries; monitoring performance; identifying and addressing problems; and attending to the ordinary tasks of administration in a timely and complete manner.

The duty of care is breached by inattention, delay, and neglect as surely as by affirmative misconduct. Failure to review a portfolio for years, failure to respond to beneficiary communications, failure to file required accountings, and failure to attend to matters requiring the trustee's decision are canonical instances of the breach of reasonable care. Restatement (Third) § 77 cmt. b; UPIA § 2(a) cmt.

Reasonable skill is the technical proficiency required to administer a trust of this character. It embraces the knowledge, judgment, and expertise a reasonable fiduciary would deploy — familiarity with trust law and the trust's own terms, competence in the areas the administration requires (investment, real property management, taxation, distribution decisions), and the capacity to recognize when specialized expertise is needed.

The doctrine does not require the trustee personally to possess every specialized skill the trust may require. A trustee who lacks investment expertise may satisfy the duty of skill by delegating to a qualified investment adviser on reasonable terms and monitoring the delegation. UTC § 807; UPIA § 9. What the duty forbids is the trustee's undertaking of a specialized task without either the skill to perform it or the arrangements to obtain that skill.

As noted, a trustee holding herself out as specially skilled is measured against that representation. A bank trust department that markets its investment expertise is held to the standard of a skilled institutional investor; a trustee who advertises legal expertise is held to a lawyer's standard in the legal aspects of administration. UTC § 806.

Reasonable caution is the element most distinctive of trust administration. It is the appropriate risk posture — the balance between preservation and productivity — that a reasonable fiduciary would maintain administering this trust. Caution reflects the trustee's role as a fiduciary of another's property; it forbids speculation and requires attention to the safety of the corpus, without foreclosing the assumption of appropriate risks consistent with the trust's purposes and time horizon.

The Restatement (Third) § 90(a) captures the same principle in investment context: risk and return are correlated, and the trustee's task is to select a risk-return profile appropriate to the trust, not to minimize risk without regard to return or to maximize return without regard to risk. Caution, so understood, is not conservatism; it is calibration.

Prudence and loyalty are analytically distinct. Loyalty forbids the trustee from serving any interest other than the beneficiaries'; it is a duty of allegiance. Prudence requires that the trustee, in serving the beneficiaries' interests, do so with reasonable care, skill, and caution; it is a duty of quality. A trustee may be perfectly loyal yet imprudent — a devoted amateur who lacks the skill or diligence the office requires — and a trustee may be prudent in the technical sense yet disloyal, if her competent administration secretly serves her own interests.

The remedies differ accordingly. Breach of loyalty typically produces disgorgement of profits regardless of trust loss; breach of prudence typically produces surcharge in the amount of loss caused. UTC § 1002. The analytic separation preserves the distinct purposes of the two duties.

Prudence and impartiality are likewise distinct. Impartiality governs the balance among beneficiaries; prudence governs the quality of administration in whatever balance the duty of impartiality — or the trust instrument — prescribes. A trustee may administer the trust with unimpeachable impartiality yet imprudently; she may administer it with great prudence yet in a manner that systematically prefers one beneficiary class.

In practice the duties overlap. A decision to invest exclusively for current yield may implicate both prudence (Was the risk-return profile appropriate?) and impartiality (Did it disregard the remainderman?). Courts analyze each duty independently, and pleadings should be framed accordingly.

The doctrine is emphatic that the trustee's conduct is evaluated as of the time she acted, on the information reasonably available to her then, and not by reference to what later developments revealed. UPIA § 8 states the principle directly: "Compliance with the prudent investor rule is determined in light of the facts and circumstances existing at the time of a trustee's decision or action and not by hindsight." Restatement (Third) § 77 cmt. a and § 90 cmt. b confirm the same principle for administration generally.

The doctrinal purpose is fidelity to the substantive standard. Prudence is a duty of process and judgment exercised prospectively; to evaluate it retrospectively, with knowledge of an outcome the trustee could not have known, would be to hold the trustee to a standard the doctrine does not impose. The court's task is to reconstruct the position of the trustee at the moment of decision, and to ask whether a reasonable fiduciary in that position, on that information, would have acted as the trustee did.

The prohibition against hindsight is easy to state and difficult to apply. Beneficiaries who bring an action for breach do so with knowledge of the outcome that motivated the action, and the fact-finder cannot un-know it. The doctrine responds by demanding that the analytic frame be reset to the moment of decision, and that the fact-finder discipline itself to evaluate the decision on the information then available.

The practical implication is that the trustee's contemporaneous record of deliberation is the record the court will review. A decision made after appropriate consideration and documented at the time is defensible even if the outcome was disappointing; a decision made without deliberation and reconstructed only in litigation is exposed even if the outcome was successful. See infra Part VIII.

Two decisions illustrate the doctrine. In re Estate of Janes, 90 N.Y.2d 41 (1997), sustained surcharge against a trustee who failed to diversify a concentrated position; the court held the failure imprudent measured at the time, not by reference to what happened next. Wood v. U.S. Bank, N.A., 828 N.E.2d 1072 (Ohio Ct. App. 2005), reached the same conclusion. In each case the court applied the prospective standard even though the outcome, in hindsight, was disastrous.

The corollary of prospective evaluation is that prudence does not guarantee success. The trustee is not an insurer. Restatement (Third) § 77 cmt. a. A prudent investment may lose value; a prudent administrative decision may prove, in retrospect, mistaken. The doctrine does not visit liability on the trustee for outcomes she could not reasonably have foreseen; it visits liability on the trustee for the failure to exercise reasonable care, skill, and caution.

The point deserves emphasis because it is a durable source of beneficiary misunderstanding. A trust that loses value in a market downturn has not, by that fact, been imprudently administered. A distribution that later appears ill-timed has not, by that fact, been imprudently made. The doctrine asks the different question: whether the trustee, on the information reasonably available at the time, exercised the care, skill, and caution the office required.

Prudent administration governs the whole range of fiduciary conduct: identification and marshaling of trust assets (Chapter 3), communications with beneficiaries (Chapter 2), decisions concerning distributions, record-keeping, tax filings, insurance, real property management, and every other task the office demands. Every act the trustee performs is subject to the standard; no aspect of administration is exempt.

The doctrinal content of the standard is uniform across these tasks: reasonable care, reasonable skill, and reasonable caution, measured against the purposes, terms, and circumstances of the trust. The particular tasks require particular knowledge and particular judgments, but the underlying standard is invariant.

The Uniform Prudent Investor Act supplies the specific rules governing prudent investment within the general duty of prudent administration. UPIA § 2(a) states the general standard; § 2(b) requires portfolio-level reasoning; § 2(c) requires consideration of a range of circumstances including tax consequences, the beneficiaries' needs for income and preservation of capital, and the trust's investment horizon; § 3 authorizes diversification; § 9 authorizes delegation. Together the provisions codify a body of investment doctrine that modernizes the prudent-person rule for the era of modern portfolio theory.

The relationship between UTC § 804 and UPIA is complementary. UTC § 804 states the general duty of prudent administration; UPIA specifies the duty as it applies to investment. A trustee whose investment decisions comply with UPIA satisfies the investment-prudence dimension of UTC § 804; a trustee whose investment decisions do not comply with UPIA breaches UTC § 804 in that dimension. The remaining dimensions of administration — communication, distribution, and the rest — are governed directly by UTC § 804 and by the specific provisions of the Code.

Investment prudence is treated at length in Volume II Part VII (Investment) and, more comprehensively, in the volume of this treatise dedicated to trust investment. The purpose of the present chapter is to state the general duty of prudent administration of which investment prudence is a specific instance.

A prudent decision has an identifiable structure. The trustee identifies the question presented, gathers the information a reasonable fiduciary would gather, considers the relevant purposes and terms of the trust and the interests of the beneficiaries affected, deliberates on the alternatives available, and decides on grounds that a reasonable fiduciary would find sufficient. Each of these stages is doctrinally significant, because each is a stage at which prudence may be exhibited or lost.

Identification of the question requires the trustee to see what is before her — an accounting decision, an investment decision, a distribution decision, a decision to litigate. Information gathering requires the trustee to obtain what a reasonable fiduciary would obtain — appraisals, professional advice, market information, tax analysis, as the question demands. Consideration requires the trustee to relate the information to the purposes, terms, and beneficiaries of the trust. Deliberation requires the trustee to reason through the alternatives. Decision requires the trustee to select an alternative on grounds she can articulate.

Every significant decision entails a risk assessment. The trustee must identify the risks — of loss, of illiquidity, of tax exposure, of beneficiary dissatisfaction, of unintended consequence — and evaluate them against the anticipated benefit. The assessment is not a formality; it is the content of the deliberation the doctrine requires. A decision that would eliminate one risk while creating a graver one is not, on that account, prudent.

The touchstone of the risk assessment is the preservation of the trust's purposes. A decision that is otherwise sensible but that undermines a stated purpose of the trust — a decision to sell a family business the trust was created to hold, for example, or to distribute principal in a manner inconsistent with the settlor's expressed preferences — fails the prudence standard, however defensible it might appear in the abstract. Prudence is fidelity to the trust; the trust's purposes supply the point of reference.

Documentation is the trustee's principal institutional protection. A contemporaneous record — of the question, the information considered, the alternatives evaluated, and the reasons for the decision — is the record the court will consult when the decision is later challenged. Where such a record exists, the trustee has a defensible foundation; where it does not, the trustee bears the practical burden of reconstructing her deliberation under adversarial scrutiny.

The doctrine does not prescribe the form of documentation, and it does not require an evidentiary showing for every ordinary decision. What it requires is that significant decisions — investment allocations of magnitude, distribution decisions in discretionary trusts, decisions to litigate or to settle, decisions to retain or to sell substantial trust property — be memorialized in a form and to a degree that a reasonable fiduciary would maintain. The scale of the documentation should be commensurate with the scale of the decision.

Institutional trustees typically maintain committee minutes, decision memoranda, and investment policy statements as a matter of routine. Individual trustees should adopt an analogous discipline. In either case, the record made contemporaneously is the record the doctrine credits.

Judicial review of a trustee's decision under the duty of prudence is deferential in form and exacting in substance. The court does not substitute its judgment for the trustee's on questions of fiduciary judgment; it reviews whether the trustee exercised reasonable care, skill, and caution in reaching the decision. Where the record shows a defensible process — information appropriately gathered, purposes appropriately considered, alternatives appropriately evaluated, and reasons appropriately stated — the decision will ordinarily be sustained even if the outcome was disappointing.

Where the record is silent, the picture darkens. A trustee who cannot show, from records made at the time, that she deliberated on the question is exposed to a finding that she did not — and courts have not hesitated to draw the inference from an absent record. The doctrine credits the record; it is skeptical of reconstruction.

The general allocation of burdens is that the beneficiary alleging breach bears the initial burden of showing a breach of the duty of prudence — a failure of reasonable care, skill, or caution. Once a breach is shown, the burden of proof on causation and damages may shift, and in cases of self-dealing or comparable disloyalty the burden may shift more comprehensively. Restatement (Third) § 100 cmt.; UTC § 1002.

Where a trustee has failed to maintain adequate records, the burden of proof effectively shifts in the practical sense: the trustee must reconstruct her deliberation from other sources, and gaps are resolved against her. The doctrine does not formally penalize inadequate documentation, but the practical effect is that the trustee bears the cost of her own record-keeping failures.

The remedies for breach of the duty of prudence are those provided generally for breach of trust, calibrated to the injury the breach caused. UTC § 1002; Restatement (Third) § 100. The primary remedy is surcharge — a money judgment against the trustee in the amount of the loss the breach caused the trust. Where the imprudent conduct produced a gain, the trustee may be required to disgorge the gain, but the ordinary remedy for imprudence is surcharge measured by loss.

Other remedies include denial or reduction of compensation, injunctive relief against continuation of the imprudent course, and, in serious cases, removal of the trustee. UTC §§ 706, 708. Exculpation clauses in the trust instrument may reduce but not eliminate liability, and cannot be relied upon where the breach was committed in bad faith or with reckless indifference. UTC § 1008. Statutes of limitation for breach of trust are addressed in Chapter 34 of this volume.

Four misconceptions recur in prudence cases and should be dispatched at the outset.

First, that prudence requires success. It does not. A trustee is not an insurer, and outcomes that were unforeseeable at the time of decision do not by themselves establish breach.

Second, that prudence can be evaluated in hindsight. It cannot. The doctrine requires evaluation as of the time of decision, on the information then available. UPIA § 8; Restatement (Third) § 77 cmt. a.

Third, that good faith is sufficient. It is not. Good faith is a necessary but not sufficient element of prudence; a well-intentioned trustee who fails to exercise reasonable care, skill, or caution breaches the duty even if her motives were unimpeachable.

Fourth, that prudence is a matter of investment alone. It is not. Prudence governs every fiduciary act. Investment prudence, addressed by UPIA, is a specific instance of the general duty stated in UTC § 804.

For the practicing trustee, the duty of prudent administration translates into a small number of durable practices. At the outset of administration, catalogue the significant decisions the trust will require and identify the information each will demand. Establish a discipline of contemporaneous documentation proportionate to the scale of the decision. Where specialized expertise is required — investment, tax, real property, litigation — obtain it, either by personal competence or by qualified delegation on reasonable terms. Frame every significant decision by reference to the purposes and terms of the trust and the interests of the beneficiaries affected. Evaluate risks explicitly; do not assume that inaction is safe. Preserve the record.

None of these practices is novel. Each is an ordinary implication of the duty of prudence as it operates in a well-administered trust. Their cumulative effect is what prudent administration looks like from the outside — the outside from which beneficiaries, courts, and successor trustees will eventually judge the office.

Chapter 10 turns to the duty of care in its narrower and more familiar sense — the trustee's obligation of diligence, attention, and skill in the handling of trust matters. Where prudent administration supplies the general standard by which every fiduciary act is measured, the duty of care as treated in Chapter 10 addresses the particular quality of engagement the office requires. Together the chapters describe the substantive standard of trustee performance under the modern doctrine.

• Uniform Trust Code §§ 804, 105, 706, 708, 806, 807, 1001–1002, 1008.
• Restatement (Third) of Trusts §§ 77, 76, 78, 79, 90, 100.
• Restatement (Second) of Trusts §§ 174, 227.
• Uniform Prudent Investor Act §§ 1–9 (1994).
• Harvard College v. Amory, 26 Mass. (9 Pick.) 446 (1830); In re Bank of New York, 35 N.Y.2d 512 (1974); In re Estate of Janes, 90 N.Y.2d 41 (1997); Wood v. U.S. Bank, N.A., 828 N.E.2d 1072 (Ohio Ct. App. 2005).
• Scott and Ascher on Trusts (5th ed.) § 17.
• Bogert, The Law of Trusts and Trustees §§ 541, 612.
• Loring and Rounds: A Trustee's Handbook, ch. 6.
• John H. Langbein, The Uniform Prudent Investor Act and the Future of Trust Investing, 81 Iowa L. Rev. 641 (1996).
• Edward C. Halbach Jr., Trust Investment Law in the Third Restatement, 77 Iowa L. Rev. 1151 (1992).