Court Opinion

ID: 9455160
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 19:13:05.462842+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:34:29.016480
License: Public Domain

BLACKMUN, Circuit Judge
(separately concurring).
I concur in Judge Matthes’ carefully prepared opinion but, fussily, wish to add a comment or two.
This case presents the situation, by no means unusual in trust law, where the trust instrument is drawn and executed and the trust is activated and then, a short while later, the trustor feels it necessary or advisable to make changes *26in the governing provisions. This may be due to oversight or to further contemplation of the hazards of life or to newly developing family concerns. But, whatever the cause, the barrier of irre-vocability may present itself and, when it does, the trustor and his scrivener have the sizable task of undoing and beginning again.
This happened for the Nysewanders, as it has for many others. However, ir-revocability of a particular trust is not a trap of the kind which has developed through rigid legal concepts spun in many areas of the law. There is usually a purpose behind irrevocability. It may be a desire for an assured and fixed family plan, or a wish permanently to be rid of property with its attendant burdens, or a desire to achieve certain tax consequences, and the like.
The issue in this case is simple and precise: Does the power of sale and disposal reserved by the senior Nysewan-ders in the eighth unnumbered (designated [10] in footnote 1) paragraph of their 1918 Trust Deed constitute a power to revoke the trust? It seems clear to me, both from a reading of the entire instrument and of that particular paragraph, that it does not. The power is no more than the routine, common power of sale (although limited here as to duration) customarily present in a trust instrument and the presence of which is desirable and, indeed, almost imperative for facile and smooth trust administration.
This being so, the well-known rules (a) that a trust is irrevocable unless revoeability is expressly reserved, Dunn v. Dunn, 219 Iowa 349, 354, 258 N.W. 695, 697-698 (1935); Young v. Young-Wishard, 227 Iowa 431, 288 N.W. 420, 426 (1939), or is clearly apparent, see In re Tolerton’s Estate, 168 Iowa 677, 150 N.W. 1051, 1054 (1915); In re Work Family Trust, 260 Iowa 898, 151 N.W.2d 490, 495 (1967), and (b) that, if there is ambiguity, the conclusion which favors the beneficiary, as against the settlor, is to be drawn, see Funsten v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 148 F.2d 805, 808 (8 Cir.1945); St. Louis Union Trust Co. v. Clarke, 352 Mo. 518, 178 S. W.2d 359, 365 (1944); 90 C.J.S. Trusts § 161(e) (1955), demand an affirmance of the result reached by Judge Stephenson.
One must recognize, of course, that when this trust was drawn and executed in 1918, now a half century ago, the niceties of trust language were not so urgent or so well developed as in this day when serious income and death tax consequences may attend any deviation on the part of the scrivener from meticulously selected words. Yet even a 50-year-old instrument must be construed when it is in litigation. For me, the Iowa decisions in Dunn, Young, and Work, supra, and the implications of those holdings, are then persuasive and compelling.