Article: Accountability for Authority

Robert Flannigan recently published an article entitled, Accountability for Authority, Wills, Trusts, & Estates Law ejournal (2021). Provided below is the abstract to the Article:

When authority is transferred for a defined or limited purpose, the recipient of the authority serves as a surrogate to advance that purpose. A trustee is one kind of surrogate. My objective here is to explain how the law of fiduciary accountability addresses the opportunism mischief that is latent in surrogate authority. I first explain the nature, virtue and limited access of surrogate authority. I then explain the accountability. I show that it applies to trustees in the same way that it applies to, for example, public servants, agents, directors, partners and parents. Then, in order to further emphasise that the mischief of opportunism is a generic mischief that is corrosive of surrogate authority in all contexts, I focus on two areas of current interest, the misuse of authority for sexual gain by employees and the exploitation of authority by police. These might initially seem to be odd areas to link analytically. The linkage, however, is informative. It illustrates that fiduciary accountability is not tied to or reflective of the idiocracy of the diverse contexts where surrogates exercise authority.