By his last will and testament, Henry Nussbaum made a residual bequest and devise of his estate to his niece, Jane Blair, as trustee, in trust for the education of his grandchildren. If the trust could not be fulfilled, the residue was to revert to the plaintiff, Dorothy Witmer.
After Nussbaum died in 1998, the plaintiff contended that the trustee had breached her fiduciary duty by failing to invest the trust corpus. A considerable portion of the trust funds were held in a checking account from 2001 to 2010. The trustee claimed that the will failed to specify when and what investments were to be made and, hence, such matters were left to her good-faith discretion.
She also explained the large checking account balances by the fact that she thought she would need access to the funds to pay for college in the near future. Decision?