What is a pure trust? Is a pure trust any different from an impure trust?
The term "pure trust" is an unknown phrase in the professional literature of trust law.

This term does not appear in

     Scott on Trusts;
     Bogart on Trusts;
     The Restatement of Trusts;
     The Restatement (Second) of Trusts; nor
     The Restatement (Third) of Trusts

The precise, unequivocal definition of a "pure trust" cannot be found. Each website tends to disagree on the subject and keeps the issue somewhat murky (unless you send them some money to a post office box (actually in care of a post office box) with the zip code in brakets or otherwise referred to as a "Postal Zone"). This site has nothing to sell you. It is the PBS of pure trusts. The others are infomercials. More "mercial" than "info."

If the term "pure trust" cannot be found in the sources I mentioned above, I suggest it is immaginary.

The term "pure trust" is unknown in Enlish law imported to the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It appears to be a recent invention of those who have a quasi-religious/political belief that the "united States" does not really exist lawfully. Notice that I did not capitalize the "U." This is not a mistake.

If you seriously invest your assets into such a format, you should know the legal philsophy of those who speak as authorities on these subjects. You will find yourself in the position of telling a judge somewhere down the line that the united States is a figment of his or her immagination. Attorneys who hold both a law license and a modicum of sanity will not advocate such a ludicrous position.

You will find the term "pure trust" in serious legal literature to the distinction, primarily under Massachusetts decisions, regarding trusts that issue ownership certificates to the beneficiaries. If the beneficiaries have control over the trustees, akin to the control shareholders have over the board of directors of a corporation, the Massachusetts courts held such arrangements to be in the nature of partnerships. But if the trustees acted as principals and the beneficiaries had purely a passive interest, then the certificate-issuing trust was a "pure trust." You will find in this site, unlike the pure-trust hawker cites, that the Supreme Court in 1924, in a case called Hecht v. Malley, 265 U.S. 144 (1924), held certificate-issuing "pure trusts" organized under the common law of Massachusetts to be associations taxable as corporations. Ask the pure-trust clowns if they've read Hecht v. Malley when they toss an out-of-context blurb quotation from Hale v. Henkel, 201 U.S. 43 (1906), a case having nothing to do with (i) tax; (ii) trusts; (iii) civil law; or (iv) the right to contract.

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