Hui Jing on Enforcing Charitable Trusts: a Study on the English Necessary Interest Rule (Legal Studies)

"Enforcing charitable trusts: a study on the English necessary interest rule"
Hui Jing
Legal Studies, 

Volume 42 , Issue 2, June 2022, pp. 228 - 245

Published in June 2022

Abstract: In England, Parliament introduced the ‘necessary interest rule’ through the enactment of section 115 of the Charities Act 2011 (England and Wales), allowing ‘any person interested’ in a charitable trust to initiate charity proceedings against defaulting trustees in their administration of charitable assets. Nevertheless, insufficient attention has been paid to this rule despite it being initially enacted in 1853. Parliament has refrained from clearly defining the rule, and the courts have long been grappling with its meaning in determining whether a person is eligible to sue. This paper studies the necessary interest rule by exploring the way in which the courts have interpreted it and the uncertainties surrounding its operation. It is shown that, in the context of charitable trusts, the concern of securing the due administration and execution of the trust lies at the heart of the rule. The final section of this paper discusses the significant theoretical implications of the necessary interest rule. It considers the beneficiary-enforcer debate concerning the conceptual nature of express trusts and highlights the insights that analysis of the rule can provide into this debate.

Launch of the Legal English in Hong Kong Website

Learning ‘legal English’, the specialized language that students encounter in law school, is particularly challenging. Law students must learn to use English forms and structures in such a way as to meet the expectations of members of the legal academic community, consistent with the conventions of the legal discipline. Learning legal English is therefore a process which involves elements of both legal expertise and language expertise. As a result, both lawyers and language teachers have something to contribute in order to support this learning process. This interdisciplinary project combines the expertise of lawyers and language teachers/applied linguists to develop a digital multimedia resource for legal English based on an analysis of the language needs of Hong Kong law students. This resource will target the most common tasks and genres for law students, e.g. essays, legal problem questions, memoranda, dissertations, oral mooting, and provide input in two forms: 1) edited video interviews with legal experts providing advice on legal writing and legal argument; 2) task-based activities created by applied linguists providing language-focused extensions on experts’ observations.

      The aims of the project are three-fold:

1. To provide an in-depth analysis of the English language needs of Hong Kong law students; 
2. To develop video-based teaching materials to target these needs, including expert videos, language-focused activities and resources; 
3. To promote the use of these language-focused materials by law professors in legal skills and content courses.

The team members are Christoph Hafner, John Burke, Katherine Lynch, Anne Scully-Hill and Rajesh Sharma.  For a sample of one of the instructional video for students, see below.  The new website can be accessed here.