A Research On Joint Liability Of The Co-Trustees

Co-trustees system has the special advantages of pooling the wisdom of the masses and checks and balances,which makes it the inevitable trend of trust system development.Co-trustees system was also introduced to our national Trust in 2001. However,a lot of details were not specified while there have been no relative judicial interpretation to turn to for instruction so far,this renders the study of co-trustees system an important task for now.Thus this article tries to deal with the problems of co-trustees responsibility through analysis of national and regional regulations and practices together with simple analysis of the domestic and foreign scholars' views on this issue.Hopefully,this article will be of some help to the improvement of our national co-trustees system.Besides the introduction and conclusion,this article can be divided into five chapters:The first chapter analyses the judicial characteristic and legal status of the co-trustees and explains the differences of co-trustees and single trustee.It also clarifies that co-trustees are the joint owners of the trust property and they have special ownership of the trust property.The second chapter first discusses the conditions for the co-trustees to take responsibility to a beneficiary through common civil liability attribution.Then it analyses the regulations of co-trustees' legal liability format in the two large legal systems and their inspiration to our trust legislation.It finally suggests that co-trustees should be granted corresponding rights of exoneration under some special conditions.The third chapter analyses the reasons why co-trustees should take legal performance towards the third party,the ways how they take responsibilities,the right to exact payment after fulfilling their debt service obligations and et al.At the same time,it proposes that co-trustees should be granted corresponding rights of exoneration in some cases.The fourth chapter makes a few suggestions concerning the regulation of the division of the responsibility among the co-trustees based upon the analysis of the two large legal systems' regulations of this issue.The concern is mostly on the choice of legislation format and detailed division rules.The fifth chapter redefines the joint act of the co-trustees which needs to be clarified in the co-trustees system.It suggests to learn from the regulation of trust legislation in Taiwan and further makes clear of the definition of joint act.