This collection of papers explores the multiple ways in which the concepts of trust and patrimony interact in various jurisdictions, with a view to advancing the understanding of the trust as a fundamental legal concept. The volume brings together key reference texts that have pioneered the trust as patrimony idea, and new works addressing contemporary challenges arising from the interaction of the two core concepts of private law. The new papers were presented at a workshop organised by the Edinburgh Centre for Private Law at the Edinburgh School of Law in 2013.

This volume is the first comparative private law study that engages systematically with the relation between trust and patrimony. It underlines the difficulties that various jurisdictions have encountered, and the solutions they have adopted, in trying to understand the common law trust and replicate it using the patrimony as main tool. It includes the first English translation of the first chapter of Pierre Lepaulle's flagship work on trusts, Traité théorique et pratique des trusts en droit interne, en droit fiscal et en droit international (1932). I am very grateful to the Paul-Andre Crepeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law and to Lionel Smith and Alexandra Popovici, in particular, for contributing this exquisite translation.

The Scottish trust features prominently across the papers in this collection. It is hoped that the extensive focus on the Scottish trust will advance the understanding of this institution in Scotland and internationally, and will increase its visibility as a feasible model for a trans-systemic variant of trust.

The editor, the publishers, and the Editorial Board of the Edinburgh Studies in Law would like to thank the authors and the following journals for kind permission to reproduce material: Revue generale de droit (Chapter 3 and Chapter 8), International and Comparative Law Quarterly (Chapter 5), European Review of Private Law (Chapter 6) and Edinburgh Law Review (Chapter 7). Full details of the date and place of first publication appear on the first page of each reprint in this volume. Subsequent references to these papers point to the relevant chapter in this book instead of their original place of publication.