Courts care about substance, not labels, so the search for intention turns on what a person said and did rather than what they privately meant or how they described the arrangement. This chapter places intention among the three certainties, then examines how courts assess it objectively, why no particular form of words is needed, and the dividing line between imperative language that creates a trust and merely precatory words that do not. It also covers when the intention must exist, the limited circumstances in which writing is required, and how a trust is distinguished from a simple debtor-creditor relationship — including the Quistclose trust that arises when money is lent for a specific purpose. It closes with what becomes of the property when intention is present but the trust fails on other grounds.
