McCaig v Glasgow University, 1907 SC 231
Citation: McCaig v Glasgow University, 1907 SC 231
Rule of thumb: What happens if a person wants the money from their will to be used for a ridiculous purpose? The term of the will is invalid – idiosyncratic requests in wills are not to be applied.
Judgment:
This case affirmed the principle of ‘absurd purpose trust’ – where there is a bequest left in a will that is of no real worthwhile value to society then it is not a valid bequest in the will and is not to be applied. The facts were that the testator, Mr McCaig, in this case made the bequest that in his will a very large chunk of his money would be used to create a purpose trust run by an investor. This trust would be used to pay for young sculptors, from the likes of Glasgow University, to build stone statues and towers of himself and his family on his estate in Oban. Mr McCaig made provisions in the trust to build these types of monuments into perpetuity, if the trust money could be invested wisely/sustainably by the investor. Mr McCaig’s plan was that this trust would be self-perpetuating for as long as possible. Mr McCaig’s sister raised the case that this bequest of her brother Mr McCaig was invalid. Mrs McCaig did not argue that Mr McCaig was incapacitated when he wrote this, rather that this was an improper bequest under succession law that could not legally be enforced. The University of Glasgow argued that this would benefit the community and be of great benefit in the arts community – they argued that the term did not meet the absurdity test required. The Court deemed that this was an improper bequest that was not enforceable. They held that any benefits to the arts community were incidental and there was not sufficient benefit to ensure that this was a proper bequest. The dissenting Judge Lord Kyllachy, who was in the minority meaning that his Judgement did not apply, but came up with a famous dictum, recommended Parliament to reform this area of law to create stricter rules in general against this type of thing. The money assigned for this from Mr McCaig’s will went to Mrs McCaig and the rest of her family, ‘it was solely a scheme for setting up so much stone building and statuary, and nothing else... it could hardly be held that these towers and statues could be a benefit to Oban, although I do not doubt that he thought so’, LJ-Clerk MacDonald at 240, ‘... it is not unlawful, it ought to be unlawful, to dedicate by testamentary disposition ... the whole income of a large estate to objects of no utility, private or public, objects which benefit nobody, and which have no other purpose or use than that of perpetuating at great cost, and in an absurd manner, the idiosyncrasies of an eccentric testator’, Lord Kyllachy at 242
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