O’Halloran, Kerry; Wyatt, Bob; Hunter, Laird; McGregor-Lowndes, Myles; Gousmett, Michael --- "Charity Law Reforms: Overview of Progress Since 2001" [2010] ELECD 671; in McGregor-Lowndes, Myles; O’Halloran, Kerry (eds), "Modernising Charity Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010)

Book Title: Modernising Charity Law

Editor(s): McGregor-Lowndes, Myles; O’Halloran, Kerry

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849802505

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: Charity Law Reforms: Overview of Progress Since 2001

Author(s): O’Halloran, Kerry; Wyatt, Bob; Hunter, Laird; McGregor-Lowndes, Myles; Gousmett, Michael

Number of pages: 35

Extract:

1. Charity law reforms: overview of
progress since 2001
Kerry O'Halloran, Bob Wyatt, Laird Hunter,
Michael Gousmett and
Myles McGregor-Lowndes

INTRODUCTION

In the UK, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, as in many
other jurisdictions, charity law is rooted in the common law and anchored on
the Statute of Charitable Uses 1601.1 The Pemsel 2 classification of charitable
purposes was uniformly accepted, and together with a shared and growing
pool of judicial precedents, aided by the `spirit and intendment' rule,3 has
subsequently allowed the law to develop along much the same lines. In recent
years, all the above jurisdictions have embarked on law reform processes
designed to strengthen regulatory processes and to statutorily define and
encode common law concepts. The reform outcomes are now to be found in
a batch of national charity statutes which reflect interesting differences in the
extent to which their respective governments have been prepared to balance
the modernising of charitable purposes and other common law concepts
alongside the customary concern to tighten the regulatory framework.


THE UNITED KINGDOM

The Charities Act 1960, introduced by Westminster and largely replicated
in the other jurisdictions of the UK, laid a roughly common baseline for
law and practice in the latter part of the 20th century. In England and
Wales, the Charity Commissioners (established under the Charitable
Trusts Act 1853) had their powers extended by the Charities Act 1960 and
further by the Charities Acts of 1992 and 1993. In Scotland, the specific
regulation of ...