¶ B01
Overview
The Act and this appendix. The Uniform Law Commission approved the Uniform Directed Trust Act at its annual conference in San Diego, July 14–20, 2017. The Act governs trusts whose terms give a person other than a trustee a power over investment, distribution or other matters of administration. It allocates duty and liability between that person, called a trust director, and the trustee who carries out the direction. Chapter 6 examines the Act as a whole, chapter 7 compares it with the leading non-uniform directed-trust statutes, and chapters 8 to 10 apply it to advisers, to the line between delegation and direction, and to liability (see supra chs. 6–10). This appendix reproduces the black-letter text of each section and follows it with a short annotation.
Source of the text. The statutory text is taken from the Commission's official text of the Act "as approved," printed without the prefatory note and comments, in the version dated September 21, 2021, as reproduced by the Kentucky Legislative Research Commission. Bracketed words are the Commission's: they mark language an enacting state is to adapt to its own code, such as a reference to its trust code or to the court with jurisdiction over trusts. The Legislative Notes that follow several sections in the official text are summarized in the annotations and are not reproduced. The official comments are not reproduced either; where an annotation states the drafters' purpose, it does so in this treatise's words, drawing on the comments as published in adapted form by the drafting committee's reporter and chair, John D. Morley & Robert H. Sitkoff, Making Directed Trusts Work: The Uniform Directed Trust Act, 44 ACTEC L.J. 3 (2019), which this treatise cites from the authors' September 28, 2018 draft (see supra ¶ 601.04).
Enactment. By the count of the ACTEC Foundation in January 2025, the Act had been approved in eighteen states. Enactments continue: Oklahoma enacted the Oklahoma Uniform Directed Trust Act of 2024, 2024 Okla. Sess. Laws ch. 369, effective November 1, 2024, and the District of Columbia adopted the Act as a chapter of Title 19 of its Code by the Uniform Directed Trust Amendment Act of 2024, D.C. Act 25-690. Several states that legislated on directed trusts before 2017 kept their own statutes, among them Delaware, South Dakota, Nevada, Wyoming, Alaska, Tennessee and Illinois (see supra ¶ 690; ch. 7). An enacting state may also vary the uniform text, most often in sections 5, 8, 9 and 11, so the enacted text of the governing state must be read before an instrument relies on the Act's allocation of duty.
How the annotations are arranged. Each annotation states what the section does and why, notes the principal non-uniform statutes that treat the same point differently, and gives the chapter of this treatise in which the section is discussed. Citations to the non-uniform statutes are to the codes as examined in chapter 7 (see supra ¶¶ 710–770).