Public international law has embarked on a new chapter. Over the past century, the classical model of international law, which emphasized state autonomy and interstate relations, has gradually ceded ground to a new model. Under the new model, a state's sovereign authority arises from the state's responsibility to respect, protect, and fulfill human rights for its people. In Fiduciaries of Humanity: How International Law Constitutes Authority, Evan J. Criddle and Evan Fox-Decent argue that these developments mark a turning point in the international community's conception of public authority. Under international law today, states serve as fiduciaries of humanity, and their authority to govern and represent their people is dependent on their satisfaction of numerous duties, the most general of which is to establish a regime of secure and equal freedom on behalf of the people subject to their power. International institutions also serve as fiduciaries of humanity and are subject to similar fiduciary obligations. In contrast to the receding classical model of public international law, which assumes an abiding tension between a state's sovereignty and principles of state responsibility, the fiduciary theory reconciles state sovereignty and responsibility by explaining how a state's obligations to its people are constitutive of its legal authority under international law. The authors elaborate and defend the fiduciary model while exploring its application to a variety of current topics and controversies, including human rights, emergencies, the treatment of detainees in counterterrorism operations, humanitarian intervention, and the protection of refugees fleeing persecution.

The Oxford Handbook of Fiduciary Law provides a comprehensive overview of critical topics in fiduciary law and theory through chapters authored by leading scholars. The Handbook opens with surveys of the many fields of law in which fiduciary duties arise, including agency law, trust law, corporate law, pension law, bankruptcy law, family law, employment law, legal representation, health care, and international law. Drawing on these surveys, the Handbook offers a synthetic analysis of fiduciary law's key concepts and principles. Chapters in the Handbook explore the defining features of fiduciary relationships, clarify the distinctive fiduciary duties that arise in these relationships, and identify the remedies available for breach of fiduciary duties. The volume also provides numerous comparative perspectives on fiduciary law from eminent legal historians and from scholars with deep expertise in a diverse array of the world's legal systems. Finally, the Handbook lays the groundwork for future research on fiduciary law and theory by highlighting cross-cutting themes, identifying persistent theoretical and practical challenges, and exploring how the field could be enriched through empirical analysis and interdisciplinary insights from economics, philosophy, and psychology. Unparalleled in its breadth and depth of coverage, The Oxford Handbook of Fiduciary Law represents an invaluable resource for practitioners, policymakers, scholars, and students in this essential field of law.

In Fiduciary Law, Tamar Frankel examines the structure, principles, themes, and objectives of fiduciary law. Fiduciaries, which include corporate managers, money managers, lawyers, and physicians among others, are entrusted with money or power. Frankel explains how fiduciary law is designed to offer protection from abuse of this method of safekeeping. She deals with fiduciaries in general, and identifies situations in which fiduciary law falls short of offering protection. Frankel analyzes fiduciary debates, and argues that greater preventive measures are required. She offers guidelines for determining the boundaries and substance of fiduciary law, and discusses how failure to enforce fiduciary law can contribute to failing financial and economic systems. Frankel offers ideas and explanations for the courts, regulators, and legislatures, as well as the fiduciaries and entrustors. She argues for strong legal protection against abuse of entrustment as a means of encouraging fiduciary services in society. Fiduciary Law can help lawyers and policy makers designing the future law and the systems that it protects.

The idea that the state is a fiduciary to its citizens has a long pedigree - ultimately reaching back to the ancient Greeks, and including Hobbes and Locke among its proponents. Public fiduciary theory is now experiencing a resurgence, with applications that range from international law, to insider trading by members of Congress, to election law and gerrymandering. This book is the first of its kind: a collection of chapters by leading writers on public fiduciary subject areas. The authors develop new accounts of how fiduciary principles apply to representation; to officials and judges; to problems of legitimacy and political obligation; to positive rights; to the state itself; and to the history of ideas. The resulting volume should be of great interest to political theorists and public law scholars, to private fiduciary law scholars, and to students seeking an introduction to this new and increasingly relevant area of study.

This volume brings together three separate works written by Paul Finn over nearly 40 years. The first, Fiduciary Obligations, was published in 1977. It has been out of print for many years, though it is still widely cited both in judicial decisions in common law countries and in international scholarship on fiduciary law. It has been regarded widely as a 'seminal' or 'classic' piece. Its publication preceded two important developments. The first was the High Court of Australia's systematic reappraisal of equity jurisprudence in the 1980s. This contributed significantly to the shaping and future direction of modern fiduciary law in Australia. The second was the growth in civil litigation in common law countries against banks, advisers in many guises, commercial 'agents', franchisees, joint venturers and other commercial actors which raised issues as to the extent to which, if at all, functions they performed for customers, etc, could attract strict fiduciary standards of conduct or merely those lesser standards otherwise imposed by the common law or equity.These two developments inform the second work in the volume, "The Fiduciary Principle", which was published in Canada in 1989, but is relatively unknown in Australia. Though its scope was limited designedly to those standards of conduct the fiduciary principle imposed on private law fiduciaries, it indicated when, and to what extent, a person or body would be a 'fiduciary' for the purposes of those standards. It accepted that, while 'fiduciary' could not be defined, it could be described. That description, founded on a 'legitimate expectation' test, is commonly used both in Australia and elsewhere.The third piece, "Fiduciary Reflections" was published in 2014 and contains the author's personal reflections on the course of Australian fiduciary law since the publication of Fiduciary Obligations. It suggests that, despite the clear signposts for the future development of fiduciary law given by the High Court in the 1980s, recent decisions of subordinate Australian courts seem to be heading, unnecessarily, in the opposite direction. Now at risk are the coherence of fiduciary law and its rationale.* Click here for information on our title Finn's Law: An Australian Justice edited by Tim Bonyhady.From the Book Launch Fiduciary Obligations and Finn's Law, address by The Hon Keith Mason AC QC, 9 February 2017..."Fiduciary Obligations comes with a modern Introductory Comment by Paul himself, a Preface by Sir Anthony Mason, and the reproduction of two of Paul's many extra-judicial contributions on the topic. These are an article on The Fiduciary Principle that first appeared in 1989 and another, called Fiduciary Reflections, that was published in 2014. The latter tracks developments in Paul's thinking and scholarship on this topic over the past 40 years as well as its reception into law. ... Together, these two books will enable the discerning academic or practitioner to survey large swathes of law. The eminence of the various contributors allows us to be sure that we are shown where the law has come from, where it is going, and where the law in Australia is converging or diverging from that of overseas. Each book shows what vast strides have been made in the coherent understanding of legal and equitable principles, the magnetic interplay between statutory and judge-made law, and the convergence of public and private law discourse that has taken place in the 46 years since Paul Finn first slipped shyly into postgraduate studies at London University." Read Launch Speech...

This book sails in uncharted waters. It takes a human rights-based approach to tax havens, and is a detailed analysis of structures and the laws that generate and support these. It makes plain the unscrupulous or merely indifferent ways in which, using tax havens, businesses and individuals systematically undermine and for all practical purposes eliminate access to remedies under international human rights law. It exposes as abusive of human rights a complex structural web of trusts, companies, partnerships, foundations, nominees and fiduciaries; secrecy, immunity and smoke screens. It also lays bare the cynical manipulation by tax havens of traditional legal forms and conventions, and the creation of entities so bizarre and chimeric that they defy classification. Yet from the perspective of the tax havens themselves, these are entirely legitimate; the product of duly enacted domestic laws. This book is not a work of investigative journalism in the style of the Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of The Panama Papers, exposing political or financial corruption, money laundering or the financing of terrorism. All those elements are present of course, but the focus is on international human rights and how tax havens do not merely facilitate but actively connive at their breach. The tax havens are compromising the international human rights legal continuum.