This book is the result of a genuinely collective enterprise. As a project, it was conceived at a preliminary meeting of one and a half days in March 1998 at the University of Trento, within a small group made up of two of the editors (Graziadei and Mattei), the chairman of the property group of the Common Core project, Professor Antonio Gambaro, and leading trust scholars Professor John Langbein from Yale, Professor Hein Kötz from Hamburg and Professor Shael Herman from Tulane. At that meeting general issues of applicability of common core methodology to the domain of trust were discussed, and a clear sense emerged that the focus should be on trust law in the commercial setting.

The trust project was officially launched in July of the same year at the general meeting of the Common Core project, in Trento, where a rudimentary first draft questionnaire was discussed in depth under the leadership of Professor Antonio Gambaro, at the property session. At that meeting Lionel Smith (at that time of Oxford University) joined the editorial team and the first participants joined in. In June 1999 all the participants to the project met in Como for a three-day conference sponsored by the University of Insubria. At that meeting draft responses to the new version of the questionnaire were discussed together with Professor John Langbein, who also gave a speech on institutional investors and the law of trusts.