Scholarship · Tier 3 · in-copyright · curator-recruitment open
Restatement (Third) of Trusts
Scholarship · Tier 3 (in-copyright; curator-recruitment open). This editorial summary is a Library editorial-team draft. The Library is recruiting a Title Steward who has institutional access to this work — see /contribute/ for the role definition.
Why this matters
The Restatement (Third) of Trusts is the American Law Institute’s authoritative statement of modern American trust law, published in four volumes between 2003 and 2012, drafted under the reportership of John H. Langbein of Yale Law School. It is the document state courts cite when they articulate what fiduciary duty currently requires — particularly when the analysis turns on prudence, loyalty, impartiality, or accounting. For school-trust-lands work, the Restatement Third is the second pillar of the doctrinal frame, sitting alongside Bogert: where Bogert is the practitioner’s treatise, the Restatement is the codifier’s distillation. The Third departs from the Second (1959) in several ways material to school-trust analysis, most notably the prudent-investor rule (replacing the older preservation-of-corpus emphasis as the primary investment standard) and the sharpened articulation of the duty to inform beneficiaries.
What’s in it
The school-trust-relevant sections — verified against the Sacred Compact footnote pass — are:
- § 78: duty of loyalty (the no-further-inquiry rule; the prohibition on self-dealing absent informed consent).
- § 79: duty of impartiality (between current and future beneficiaries; between classes of beneficiaries).
- § 83: duty to keep records and to provide information to beneficiaries.
- § 95: parens patriae enforcement of public charitable trusts; the attorney-general’s role.
- § 100: surcharge — the measure of trustee liability for breach.
The doctrinal arc across the three Restatements — First (1935), Second (1959), Third (2003–2012) — is itself worth tracing. The Second emphasized preservation of corpus as the cardinal investment duty; the Third’s prudent-investor rule reframes that duty in modern-portfolio-theory terms. For school-trust analysis, the Third’s articulation of impartiality (§ 79) is particularly useful: it explicitly addresses the present-versus-future-beneficiary tension that school-trust cases turn on.
Most-quoted passages
The Library does not reproduce Restatement section text under fair-use limits in this Tier 3 stub. The Sacred Compact footnotes already cite the listed sections at the points where the Restatement’s articulation is doctrinally load-bearing. A Title Steward with ALI or Westlaw access may add up to three short quotations under thirty words each, fully cited, prioritizing § 79 (impartiality) and § 100 (surcharge) which carry unusual analytic weight in school-trust contexts.
How it connects to the Library’s argument
The Sacred Compact argues that the school-trust compact created in 1785 and ratified in each state’s Admissions Act is a genuine trust — meaning the full modern trust-law apparatus of loyalty, impartiality, accounting, and surcharge applies to the trustee state as it would to any other trustee. The Restatement (Third) is the document that makes the modern version of that apparatus citable. Section 79’s impartiality rule is the doctrinal center of the school-trust argument: schools as a beneficiary class span generations, and every dollar diverted to current general-fund needs is a dollar withheld from the future-beneficiary class the granting acts named. Section 95’s parens patriae rule is the doctrinal center of the standing argument: where private beneficiaries cannot or will not enforce, the attorney-general (and, in standing-friendly states, public-interest plaintiffs) must. Section 100’s surcharge rule supplies the remedy. The Sacred Compact and Schools of the Republic cite the Restatement at exactly these load-bearing points; a Title Steward could refine the editorial summary to track each section to the white-paper passage that depends on it.
How to engage
- WorldCat search: https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=restatement+third+trusts (find this title at a library near you)
- Interlibrary loan: ask your local library to request it. Law-school libraries hold the four-volume set.
- Publisher purchase link: https://www.ali.org/publications/ (American Law Institute, search “Restatement Third Trusts”)
- Westlaw and Lexis: most subscribing law firms and law schools.
- Used-book channels (access paths, not commerce): AbeBooks, ThriftBooks. Note: the four-volume set is rarely sold complete used.
- Submit a correction or annotation: /contribute/
- Apply to be Title Steward for this book: /contribute/
Curated by
Title Steward — OPEN. This editorial summary is a draft by the Library editorial team, 2026-05-07. We are recruiting a Title Steward who has institutional access to this work and the time to refine the summary into something authoritative. Especially well-suited to law-school faculty, trust-and-estates attorneys, school-finance officers, state-lands-agency staff, and library-science curators of state-finance collections. See /contribute/ for the role definition.
