Extending the ‘Withering Rights’ Thesis: Settlor Reserved Powers and Limited Judicial Review
26 October 2026 (Monday), 5:00 – 6:00 PM
Rm 901, 9/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong
Professors Loi and Low argue that, in massively discretionary trusts, trustee accountability may survive only as fig leaf, rather than as fact. Beneficiaries may have rights in theory, yet lack the information or practical means needed to enforce them. This seminar considers how that problem combines with the settlor control mechanisms common in modern family wealth structures – including private trust companies, letters of wishes, reserved powers, and protector vetoes and appointment or removal powers – together with the limited grounds on which courts intervene in discretionary decisions. Do these arrangements leave beneficiaries even less able to hold trustees and protectors to account?
Speaker:
Mark Bennett is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is a trusts law scholar whose work examines the boundaries of legitimate trust form, including settlor control, illusory trusts, asset protection, and the use of trusts to avoid or subvert other areas of law. He is a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Trust Laws, and has published articles in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, the King’s Law Journal, the Osgoode Hall Law Journal, the Journal of Equity, and Law and Philosophy, among others. Mark holds an LLB(Hons) and BA from Victoria University of Wellington, an LLM from Harvard Law School as a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow, and a SJD from the University of Toronto, where he was a Connaught Fellow.
Moderator:
Lusina Ho, Harold Hsiao-Wo Lee Professor in Trust and Equity,
The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law