Cal. Prob. Code § 16040

Trustee’s Standard of Care

Known as the Trust Law

The act spans §§ 15000–19403 (351 sections).

Applied in 4 court decisions — leading case San Mateo Union High School District v. County of San Mateo (2013)

Most recently applied in 8 Cal. App. 5th 1184 - O'Neal v. Stanislaus County Employees' Retirement Assn. (February 2017)

Amended by Stats. 1995, Ch. 63, Sec. 4

How often courts cite this section

citing decisions per year

Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.

(a) The trustee shall administer the trust with reasonable care, skill, and caution under the circumstances then prevailing that a prudent person acting in a like capacity would use in the conduct of an enterprise of like character and with like aims to accomplish the purposes of the trust as determined from the trust instrument.

(b) The settlor may expand or restrict the standard provided in subdivision (a) by express provisions in the trust instrument. A trustee is not liable to a beneficiary for the trustee’s good faith reliance on these express provisions.

(c) This section does not apply to investment and management functions governed by the Uniform Prudent Investor Act, Article 2.5 (commencing with Section 16045).

Official source: California Legislative Information. Reproduced from public-domain California statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.