A treatise on equity necessarily identifies its material by harking back to the distinction between the separate rules applied by the court of chancery and by the common law courts prior to the Judicature Acts.  The recent debate about taxonomy has shown that a division of legal rules on this basis is unhelpful and has lead to duplication and inconsistency.    A more illuminating exposition of legal rules would, so far as possible, avoid making that distinction.  For these reasons, in a perfect world there would be no place for a book such as this.  So much is clear.

What is not so clear however is how the duplication and inconsistency between common law rules and rules of equity is to be ironed out so that it will eventually be possible to describe the rules of the legal system without regard to their historical origin.  One problem is that generations of lawyers have been used to thinking in terms of separate rules at common law and in equity.  Indeed the distinction has become so imbedded in concepts such as legal and equitable interests in property that a description of such concepts without using words such as legal or equitable would seem very odd indeed.   Another problem is that the fusion of legal and equitable rules can only be carried out properly and with due regard to the richness and subtlety offered by the existing system once those separate rules have been fully understood.  The understanding of equitable rules in particular has been hampered by formulations in terms of competing principles doctrines and maxims, the notion that remedies depend on the exercise of judicial discretion and opaque concepts such as unconscionability.  The aim of this book is to assist in the understanding of those equitable rules.  If that means that, in due course, it is possible to state the rules of our legal system without reference to their historical origin so that a book such as this is no longer required, then so be it.

Two major changes have been made in the present edition.  First, an attempt has been made at reordering the text in a way which assists exposition.  Thus, for example, the general rules concerning equitable protection and equitable remedies appear before consideration is given to the particular application of those principles in the fields of trusts, administration of estates and securities.  Secondly there are new chapters on fiduciaries, powers of appointment, personal monetary claims, setting aside mortgages and a new ordering of the material on informal, resulting, and constructive trusts into three separate chapters to reflect the different roles which these trusts can fulfil.

The task of editing a book such as this is too much for one person trying also to cope with the separate demands of family life and practice at the bar.  I have been fortunate in being able to enlist seven of my colleagues to relieve my burden.  David Fox has been responsible for chapters 2, 4, 19, 22-24 and 28, Matthew Conaglen chapter 7, Thomas Leech chapters 8-11, Timothy Dutton chapters 12-18, Timothy Harry chaptes 20, 21 and 25-27, Adam Smith chapters 29-33 and Edwin Johnson chapters 34-43.