4. Certainty

This chapter discusses the role of certainty in questions of trust and power in property management. For an obligation to be legally enforceable, it must be defined with sufficient certainty to allow the courts to control it, and a power conferring authority can only be exercised within the limits subject to which it is created. This range of different types of obligation has implications for the applicable tests for certainty. The court must know who is under an obligation, what the obligation is, to what property the obligation relates, and who can enforce the obligation. In the case of a power, the court needs to know who can exercise the power, how it can be exercised, and whether the power has been validly exercised.