⚖️ Trusts & Estates: A Private Perspective

by Hamburgler, your favorite non-barred settlor

🧾 Settlor, Not Grantor

If you're still calling yourself a “grantor,” you’re playing their game. The settlor settles the law. Period. A settlor creates a private world — a jurisdiction within a jurisdiction — and assigns trustees to move with purpose, not permission.

📍 The First Land Trust: 1634, Massachusetts

Long before LLCs and corporations, colonists used land trusts to obscure ownership. The first of record? Rev. John Eliot's trust in Massachusetts Bay Colony, used to hold land on behalf of local Indigenous peoples. Land was titled in one name but controlled by others. The trust was anonymity with accountability — a powerful combo.

🧠 Trusts in the Constitution

Article I, Section 10 bars states from impairing contracts — and guess what a trust is? A contract under seal. Private trusts operate with constitutional armor when structured correctly. No license. No franchise. Just equity and intent.

🔐 Business, But Private

A trust is not a business. But a business can be held by a trust. The distinction is crucial: trusts don’t “do commerce,” they administer property. When you form a trust to manage a bakery, it's not a bakery trust. It's a private arrangement that happens to own dough and ovens.

📚 Codices & Maxims

Look past the IRS pamphlets and into equity maxims:

• Equity regards as done that which ought to be done.
• A trust will not fail for want of a trustee.
• Equity looks to the intent, not the form.

Also explore:

• Restatement (Third) of Trusts
• Uniform Trust Code
• Bogert on Trusts
• The Book of the Law, for those who read between more than legal lines

🪪 Final Thought

Trusts aren’t loopholes. They’re tools of self-determination. And if structured right — privately, with clear duties and no public benefit — they remain outside the corporate franchise and inside your control.

You don’t need permission to be private. You just need clarity, courage, and a solid indenture.

Stay private. Stay deliberate.
— Hamburgler