Rise of the Purpose Trust

Most estate planners know the three basic elements of a trust: a trustee, a corpus, and one or more beneficiaries. Many commentators regard the presence of a beneficiary as the most important element, because without a beneficiary there would be no one to enforce the trust and hence there could be no trust.¹ There is, of course, one traditional, notable exception to this rule: A charitable trust may have no beneficiaries per se and still not fail. That is because it is well-settled