The first edition of A Trustee's Handbook, by Augustus Peabody Loring, appeared in 1898. Mr. Loring, who saw his brainchild through its fourth edition, was a practicing lawyer and a Boston trustee. In the 40 years that passed before his death, his small, compact Handbook played an important role in the dramatic growth of trust administration in this country. It quickly became the trustee's text of first resort. In 1940 Professor Scott wrote that for more than three decades the Handbook had been on his desk or near at hand. Mayo Adams Shattuck, Esq. prepared the Handbook's fifth (1940) and sixth (1962) revisions respectively.
In 1994 the Handbook was given a new lease on life with the publication of the Seventh Edition in hardcover. That was followed by the 1996 Edition in soft cover, and then the 1997 Edition also in soft cover. The 1998 Edition in hardcover marks the passing of the publishing baton from Little, Brown & Company to Aspen Law & Business. 1998 also marks the 100th anniversary of the handbook's existence.
I was fortunate enough to be Professor Rounds' chief student research assistant when he took the challenge in 1992 of preparing the seventh Edition. Times had changed since 1962. The state was now dispensing many more entitlements and regulating commercial activity far more intensely than had been the case thirty years earlier. In the late 1960s - perhaps in response to these developments - law schools had set about the process of downgrading courses in the law of trusts from required to elective status, so that by the early 1990's, while almost all law schools had made courses on state regulation mandatory, only a few (most notably Suffolk University Law School in Boston) were continuing to afford the law of trusts the status it enjoyed in Mr. Loring's time. In most law schools, the law of trusts had become an afterthought, buried somewhere in an elective course on estate planning. Professor Rounds and I, therefore, could not assume - as Mr. Loring could and surely did - that the young lawyers who would read the Seventh Edition had had any formal instruction in the law of trusts.
Moreover, much had happened in the field of trusts since 1962. The years since then had seen major developments in the area of creditors' rights, spousal rights, and Medicaid eligibility and recoupment. ERISA would not arrive on the scene until 1974. There was no such thing as an IRA or Keogh plan. RICO, CERCLA, and the consumer protection statutes had yet to be enacted. It would be many years before the social investment movement would come into its own. These are just some of the developments that had to be worked into the Seventh Edition.
The Challenge of revamping and updating the Handbook proved a daunting task. Working off a table of contents that he had redesigned, Professor Rounds would compose the text, footnotes, and end matter on his word processor. As each chapter was completed, I would parcel various sections of it out to the other research assistants. They would then get to work tying up loose ends and cite checking. Processing and keeping track of the myriad drafts was perhaps the most rewarding of all the support tasks as I was the only one, besides Professor Rounds, who had a sense of the big picture. It was exciting to watch the seventh Edition inexorably congeal. Professor Rounds set the pace for all of us by working nights, weekends, and holidays for months on end. He wanted the final product to be something of which we all could be proud. His energy, enthusiasm, and intellectual rigor were contagious.
The Seventh Edition was not to be a treatise. We wanted it to be a handy, ready reference: a gateway, as it were, to the treatise, restatements, law review articles, uniform statutes, and seminal cases. In 1898, Mr. Loring had succeeded in producing just such a book. Through the Seventh Edition we were endeavoring to revive and carry on the Loring tradition. In my opinion, we accomplished what we had set out to do.
Now comes the 1998 Edition. Though it is much enhanced from earlier editions, Professor Rounds would be the first to admit that it stands on the shoulders of others. Much, of course, is owed to those who appear in the Acknowledgements. But much also is owed to those who participated in the Loring Project during the Loring, Shattuck, and Farr eras: Nathaniel Thayer, Herman Weisman, Frederick W. Doring, Samuel Vaughan, Arthur Drinkwater, Frank L. Weigand, Jr., Stuart MacMillian, William M. Prest, Harold S. Davis, B. Devereux Barker, Levon Kasarjian, Jr., and Roger B. Hunt.
George J. McElroy, Jr.
April 8, 1998