Of Patrimony and Assets

 Faculty members and graduate students are invited to attend this BCL/MJur Advanced Property and Trusts guest seminar.

 Attendees would find it helpful to read the following in advance of the seminar:

• Lepaulle, ‘An Outsider’s View Point of the Nature of Trusts’ (1928) 14 Cornell LQ 52
• Kasirer, ‘Translating Part of France’s Legal Heritage: Aubry and Rau on the Patrimoine’ (2008) 38 Revue générale de droit 453
• Smith, ‘Massively Discretionary Trusts’, forthcoming in CLP (https://ssrn.com/abstract=2932933 ).
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The following questions will be considered in the seminar (among others):

1. What is the relationship between the idea of the patrimony and the concept of legal personality?
2. How does the civilian distinction between patrimonial and extrapatrimonial rights (and obligations) help us to understand the distinction between assets and non-assets? How is this latter distinction conceptualized in the common law?
3. Why might a person say that the common law does not know the civilian idea of the ‘subjective right’?
4. Does the theory of the patrimony help us to understand the possibility of appropriating assets to a purpose other than the aims of the holder from time to
time? Does it help us to understand the common law’s reticence with respect to non-charitable purpose trusts?
5. Where is the theory of the patrimony in the common law? What rules and principles of the common law aim to match up a person’s wealth with the responsibilities that they incur to others?