Bellows v. Page

The will of the petitioner’s aunt, Mary Adams Patterson Bellows, provides merely that the petitioner’s share should be held “in trust” for her by her mother. It imposed no duties upon the trustee, it clothed her with no discretionary powers, no action on her part was required in order to effectuate any discernible purpose which the testatrix may have had in mind when she created the trust. The will, therefore, creates a use, or, in more modern phraseology, a “ dry, ” “passive ” or “naked” trust, and as such it is executed by force of the statute of uses, (27 Hen. VIII, c. 10), a statute which…