This article takes as its starting point three ground-breaking articles by Len Sealy in the 1960s, and examines their lasting impact on the modern law of fiduciaries. It includes a detailed consideration of the modern tendency to describe rather than define fiduciaries; it critiques the current readiness to merge fiduciaries with other power-holders, thus ignoring the significant differences between the duties of loyalty in issue in the two contexts; and finally it evaluates and defends the modern approach to fiduciary remedies, especially equitable compensation.

This article addresses the manner in which accounts of profits are quantified when they are ordered against fiduciaries. Unlike previous scholarship, which has often sought to explain recent case law by reference to preconceived conceptual models, the present article addresses the topic by drawing on the reasoning adopted in the cases over a longer period, with a view to helping with the practical resolution of future cases, while also offering arguments drawn from that analysis as to the correct approach to the conceptual questions that arise.

This article proposes a new framework for determining the availability of proprietary remedies for breach of the fiduciary duty of loyalty. It examines the alternative and conflicting arguments put forward in the leading cases, and suggests that they fail to justify their conclusions, either under- or over-estimating the incidence of proprietary relief for fiduciary disloyalty. These shortcomings appear to be the result of inappropriate reliance on familiar equitable formulae, in particular the routine equitable duty to account, the seemingly inescapable maxim that “equity treats as done that which ought to be done”, and the potent rules of tracing.