legal-terms trusts-and-estates
Why does &quot;object&quot; mean &quot;the persons who may benefit from property on the exercise of a distributive power, or discretionary trust&quot;?
<p>I know that legal persons can be natural/physical, or juridical/fictitious. But even fictitious persons are animate, or are run by humans! Hence, this word choice of OBJECTS feels weird, because &quot;objects&quot; denote inanimacy, whereas OBJECTS defined below refer to animate persons.</p>
<h4>Why did trust law choose &quot;OBJECTS&quot; for the definitions below? Can you explain this word choice to make it feel more natural? Has anyone proffered a better term?</h4>
<blockquote>
<p>OBJECTS the persons who may benefit from
property on the exercise of a distributive
power or discretionary trust.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>Pearce and Stevens' Trusts and Equitable Obligations</em> (2022) 8th edn, page lxiii.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Another form of express trust is the discretionary trust under which the trustees have discretion to ‘appoint’
(meaning ‘to distribute’) the property as they wish to people from a particular class of potential
beneficiaries, known as the <strong>objects [emphasis added]</strong>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Paul Davies, <em>Equity &amp; Trusts: Text, Cases, and Materials</em> (2019) 3rd edn, page 30.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>3.7 The result of the trustees having a discretion to select only some of the possible beneficiaries
means, of course, that some might not receive any money at all, in which case
they will not really be ‘beneficiaries’ of the trust. For this reason, the term <strong>‘objects’ [emphasis added]</strong> is
used, and the group of objects among whom the trustee may select is called the ‘class of
objects’. ‘Objects’, then, is the compendious term that covers beneficiaries under a fixed
trust, possible beneficiaries under a discretionary trust, and possible recipients under a
power of appointment, to which we now turn.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>James Penner, <em>The Law of Trusts</em> (2022) 12th edition, page 52.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>        But trusts need not work in this way. The settlor may pass property to a trustee to
distribute among a defined group of individual beneficiaries, but leave it to the trustee
to decide exactly who is to get what. These trusts are known as discretionary trusts,
for the simple reason that the trustee has a discretion as to how the property is to be
distributed among this group of beneficiaries (or, as we more usually call them in such
cases, <strong><em>objects</em> [emphasis added]</strong>). The discretion given to the trustee may be more or less extensive. So, a
settlor may give his trustee free rein to decide what property, if any, each beneficiary
is to receive. Alternatively, he may stipulate that each of the beneficiaries must receive
something, but leave it to the trustee to determine exactly what each gets.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Tim Akkouh, <em>Trusts Law</em> (2017) 5th edn, page 19.</p>

<p>&quot;Object&quot; doesn't necessarily denote inanimacy.  Consider the sentence <em>Alice likes Bob.</em>  Grammatically, <em>Bob</em> is the object of the sentence.  Apart from grammatical analysis, we can also say that Bob is the object of Alice's affection.</p>
<p>In other words, a more general sense of <em>object</em> is &quot;something toward which something else is directed.&quot;  (In modern idiomatic English, you will probably more likely hear <em>objective</em> used for that, especially when the object/objective is an abstract goal.)</p>
<p>The concept at use here is defined in Black's law dictionary (second edition) under the phrase <em>objects of a power:</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Where property is settled subject to a power given to any person or persons to appoint the same among a limited class, the members of the class are called the &quot;objects&quot; of the power.  Thus, if a parent has a power to appoint a fund among his children, the children are called the &quot;objects&quot; of the power.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Analogous to Bob being the object of Alice's affection because the affection is directed toward Bob, the children in the example are the objects of the power because the power is applied to the children.</p>
