Knight v Knight

Ratio Decidendi

ਤੱਥ

The case concerned the will of Richard Knight, who left his substantial family estates and expressed a wish or 'confidence' that the person taking under the will would continue to hold the property so that it would pass down the family line. The question for the court was whether these precatory words — words of hope, wish, or confidence — imposed a binding trust on the recipient in favour of later members of the family, or amounted only to a moral, non-binding expression of the testator's desire, leaving the recipient absolutely entitled.

ਫੈਸਲੇ ਦਾ ਸਾਰ

Lord Langdale MR held that precatory words — expressions of hope, wish, desire, or confidence — do not by themselves create a trust; whether they do depends on whether, construing the instrument as a whole, the maker intended to impose an enforceable obligation. In the course of his judgment he set out the requirements that have become known as the 'three certainties' for a valid express trust: certainty of intention (the words, taken together, must be so used as to be imperative and to show an intention to create a trust rather than merely to make a moral appeal); certainty of subject matter (the property subject to the trust, and the beneficial interests in it, must be identifiable); and certainty of objects (the persons intended to benefit must be ascertainable). On the facts, the words used were held not to impose a trust, so the recipient took beneficially. The formulation has been treated ever since as the classic statement of the essential certainties, though the modern approach to certainty of intention looks to the whole instrument rather than to any fixed formula of words.

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