Vorlander v. Keyes’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

7 federal appellate · 1 district · 9 state decisions

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 18 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “One who, acting in a fiduciary capacity, secretly and wrongfully, and therefore, fraudulently, uses fiduciary funds to purchase real estate or personal property, including policies of life insurance, for his own benefit and puts it in his own name, takes the title and interest in it as a trustee ex malefico for the owner of the misappropriated funds he thus uses, the cestui que trust. The equitable ownership and title of the misappropriated funds and the fruits thereof remain in the cestui que trust as long as they can be traced, and the trustee holds nothing but the naked title for the exclusive benefit of the cestui que trust. In equity, not only the property which the trustee acquires with the misappropriated funds, but all its fruits, in every form, its increase, its income, other property acquired by the trustee by the exchange or use of it in any way, become, at the option of the cestui que trust, his property, unless it has passed into the hands of a bona fide purchaser for value without notice of the misappropriation. In no event is the trustee ex malefico entitled in equity to any benefit to himself from the use of the trust funds... . Nor may another, in this case the wife, now the widow of the trustee ex maleficio, though herself innocent of the fraud, who has paid no consideration for the property purchased with the misappropriated funds or for their fruits, hold any of them against the cestui que trust, the owner thereof.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. 691 So. 2d 990 - Lackey v. Lackey