In 2014, the Maryland General Assembly enacted the Maryland Trust Act with a delayed effective date of January 1, 2015. The Maryland Trust Act is derived from the Uniform Trust Code but adapted to conform with certain aspects of the Maryland common law. Prior to the enactment of the Maryland Trust Act, most of the Maryland Law of Trusts was not codified.
Although effective January 1, 2015, the Maryland Trust Act applies to all trusts whether created before, on, or after the effective date of the statute other than judicial proceedings concerning trusts that were commenced prior to the effective date. MTA § 14.5-1006.
Like the Uniform Trust Code, the Maryland Trust Act does not supplant the common law of trusts: “The common law of trusts and principles of equity supplement this title, except to the extent modified by this title or another statute of this State.” MTA § 14.5-106. The common law, of course, is not static. Conceptually, rules regulating complex human relationships, like those involved in trusts, may be more perfectly developed by the evolutionary process of the common law as opposed to attempting to create such rules from a universal theory of human relationships based on a comprehensive statute.[1] Thus, the codification of the Maryland Law of Trusts must be understood against the backdrop of the common law as it developed up to the Maryland Trust Act and, for that matter, as it evolves going forward.
[1] This was Oliver Wendell Holmes’ argument for the common law: “What has been said (about the development of judge-made law) will explain the failure of all theories which consider the law only from its formal side; whether they attempt to deduce a corpus from a priori postulates, or fall into the humbler era of supposing the science of law to reside in the elegantia juris, or logical cohesion of part with part. The truth is, that the law always approaching, and never reaching, consistency. It is forever adapting new principles from life and at one end, and it always retains old ones from history at the other, which have not yet been absorbed or sloughed off. It will come entirely consistent only when it ceases to grow.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “The Common Law, Lecture I-Early Forms of Liability (Project Gutenberg 2000, www.gutenberg.org).
