Book Note: Honoré’s South African Law of Trusts, Edwin Cameron, Marius de Waal & Peter Solomon

In the preface to the sixth edition of Honoré’s South African Law of Trusts, Edwin Cameron notes that this edition includes extensive revision to the law pertaining to trusts. The sixth edition not only contains updates to the case law and legislation as they pertain to the law of trusts, but the book importantly also considers the law of trusts in the context of the constitutional development of the law. Whilst the sixth edition retains the same format as one finds in the previous editions, there has been a rearrangement of some chapters and sections in order to link the topics discussed in each chapter and to allow for a natural flow of the subjects and content. The authors have also decided to omit the chapter on ‘Jurisdiction and conflict of laws’ in this edition. The reasoning behind this, as Cameron points out, is that the chapter ‘seems to have had a diminishing practical significance’. The sixth edition therefore contains thirteen chapters, with ‘Taxation of trusts’ being the final chapter. As with previous editions, the chapters in this edition are arranged first to provide an introduction to the law of trusts in general, before moving on to discuss specific topics within the law of trusts.