David Foster, University College London Faculty of Laws, has posted Fraud, Trusts and Trusting: Enforcing Crown Forfeitures in Equity, c.1570–1620, which is forthcoming in the Journal of Legal History:
Conveyances with informal agreements to hold for the benefit of the transferor initially proved efficacious in avoiding statutory forfeiture provisions. In the late sixteenth century, the equity side of the Exchequer developed a capacious doctrine of revenue fraud designed to capture such informal arrangements and to subject the transferor to liability for crown forfeitures. Initially drawing inspiration from the ‘badges of fraud’ in the Statute of Fraudulent Conveyances 1571, the Exchequer quickly lowered the evidentiary threshold required to prove a conveyance fraudulent. A key badge of fraud was an ‘entrusting’ of the transferee by the transferor. The presence of a conveyance ‘in trust’ eventually became the sole evidence required to hold certain conveyances fraudulent under the statute. In the longer term, these cases became the precedential basis for holding the beneficiary’s right under a trust liable to forfeiture as a matter of doctrine.
Sir Edward Coke (NYPL)
--Dan Ernst
