Administration of Estates in UK Law

As I have said, the better view is that the period under section 22(a) of the 1980 Act (in cases to which that section applies) will not begin to run until the administrator has paid the costs, funeral and testamentary and administration expenses, debts and other liabilities properly payable out of the assets in his hands, and provided for the payment of any pecuniary legacies.

It is no misuse of language to describe the property as being held by the trustee on a statutory trust if the qualifying adjective "statutory" is understood as indicating that the trust does not bear all the indicia which characterise a trust as it was recognised by the Court of Chancery apart from statute.

All that was intended to be conveyed by the use of the expression "trust property" and "trust" in these and subsequent cases (of which the most recent is Pritchard v. M.H. Builders Ltd. [1969] 1 W.L.R. 409) was that the effect of the statute was to give to the property of a company in liquidation that essential characteristic which distinguished trust property from other property, viz., that it could not be used or disposed of by the legal owner for his own benefit, but must be used or disposed of for the benefit of other persons.

In English law the rights of a testamentary legatee in the unadministered estate of a testator are well settled: see Lord Sudeley v. Attorney General [1897] A.C. 11 and Commissioner of Stamp Duties (Queensland) v. Livingston [1965] A.C. 694. A legatee's right is to have the estate duly administered by the personal representatives in accordance with law. But during the period of administration the legatee has no legal or equitable interest in the assets comprised in the estate.

One thing on which the parties were in agreement was the approach of the Court to the construction of a will. As mentioned above, it was common ground before the judge that no extrinsic evidence was admissible. He had therefore to follow the guidance of Lord Simon L.C. in Perrin v Morgan [1943] A.C. 399 at 406 and to construe the language of the will so as to find:

I should like to say (what is indeed obvious) that where a plaintiff in the end fails it must be a very unusual thing to order the successful defendant to pay the costs; and it would only be in exceptional cases that a Judge would think to right to make such an ordered.