Fraud on creditors

Abstract

Transfers 'out of a debtor's indebtedness' provoked in Elizabethan times a narrow range of rigid solutions based on legal doctrines of constructive fraud and a more broad-based evidential doctrine of ostensible ownership. One of these legal doctrines has been continued in recent cases, and others may be continued unless there is a clear understanding of why they arose in the first place. This article argues that legal as well as evidential doctrines are not appropriate in modern business contexts and develops a theoretical non-contractarian framework for demonstrating this.