Fiduciary law is a critically important body of law. Fiduciary duties ensure the integrity of a remarkable variety of relationships, institutions, and organizations. They apply to relationships of great personal significance, including in some jurisdictions the relationship between parents and children. They structure a wide variety of commercial relationships, and they are essential to the regulation of relationships between professional service providers and their clients, including relationships between lawyer and client, doctor and patient, and investment manager and client. Fiduciary duties, perhaps uniquely in private law, challenge traditional ways of marking the boundaries between private and public law, inasmuch as they figure prominently in public governance. Indeed, there is even a storied tradition of thinking of the authority of the state in fiduciary terms.

Notwithstanding its importance, fiduciary law has been woefully under-analysed by legal theorists. Filling this gap with a series of chapters by leading theorists, this book includes chapters on: the nature of fiduciary relationships, the connection between fiduciary duties and morality, the content and significance of fiduciary loyalty, the economic significance of fiduciary law, the application of fiduciary principles to public law and international law, the import of fiduciary relationships to theories of authority, and various other fundamental topics in the field. In many cases, new and important questions are raised by the book's chapters. Indeed, this book not only offers a much-needed theoretical assessment of fiduciary topics, it defines the field going forward, setting an agenda for future philosophical study of fiduciary law.

Andrew S. Gold's profile page

Paul B. Miller's profile page

Andrew S. Gold is Bruce W. Nichols Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Professor of Law at DePaul University College of Law. His recent scholarship has focused on fiduciary theory, contract theory, civil recourse theory, and corrective justice. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School, and an HLA Hart Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford. He is also a co-founder of the North American Workshop on Private Law Theory. Paul B. Miller is Associate Professor at McGill University Faculty of Law. He is a philosopher of private law concentrating on fiduciary law, trusts, corporate law, and the law of unincorporated organizations. He formerly served as a law clerk to the Hon. Justice Ian Binnie of the Supreme Court of Canada and taught law at Queen's University. He is also a co-founder of the North American Workshop on Private Law Theory.

"This edited collection brings together a number of leading scholars, one might say an all-star cast, to consider an area of law which, in recent years, has become increasingly topical. The editors are also admirably ambitious for the book, believing that it will âset the agenda for philosophical study of fiduciary law for generations to comeâ. Only the passage of time can vindicate that claim; but the coverage and quality of the collection go a long way to justifying such an expectation."

--Daniel J Carr, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Law Review

"A deep and wide-ranging exploration of fiduciary law by leading scholars from around the world. Anyone working in private or public law who is interested in fundamental questions associated with this topic-whether doctrinal, philosophical, or pragmatic-should start with this volume."

--John Goldberg, Eli Goldston Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

"With the renewed interest in private law theory in the last decade, fiduciary obligations have emerged as an especially fertile area of study. As these obligations appear in so many areas of law - from corporate law to family law to the law of trusts - it can be it difficult to get a view of the whole. The chapters in Gold and Miller's volume provide just that. Individually, the contributions advance our understanding of fiduciary law in multiple directions. Taken together, they provide an excellent introduction to fiduciary law as a whole, to the various scholarly approaches to fiduciary obligations, and to the contemporary debates about their design, purpose and justification."

--Gregory Klass, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center

"This collection, made up of essays from eminent private law thinkers, is a landmark in the field. It both launches fiduciary theory as a serious academic project and constitutes perhaps the most important contribution to that project."

--Matthew Harding, Professor of Law, Melbourne Law School