The whole section
The common law of trusts and principles of equity supplement this code, except to the extent modified by this code or another law of this state, including, but not limited to, s. 736.0110(3).
Section 736.0106, Florida Statutes. Enacted in 2006 and amended in 2025.
One sentence, and it sets the relationship between the statute and everything that came before it. The Florida Trust Code is a supplement to the common law of trusts, not a replacement for it.
Read that alongside section 736.0105, which makes most of the Code a default the settlor can write around, and the shape of Florida trust law becomes clear. The statute is neither exhaustive nor, mostly, mandatory. It is a framework with the older law underneath and the trust instrument on top.
Why a sentence like this decides cases
Its work is defensive. When a party argues that a doctrine no longer exists because the Code does not mention it, this section is the reply. The question the section poses is not whether the Legislature addressed something, but whether it modified the prior rule.
The Fifth District applied it that way in 2024, in the long-running litigation over the Alfred duPont charitable trust and the Nemours Foundation. The Attorney General of Delaware sued the Florida trustees, and the trustees argued that permitting her to do so offended the separation of powers, in effect because the Code had assigned charitable trust enforcement elsewhere. The court disagreed.
Florida’s Trust Code provides that ‘[t]he common law of trusts and principles of equity supplement this code, except to the extent modified by this code or another law of this state.’ § 736.0106, Fla. Stat. The Trustees’ separation of powers argument likewise fails...
Jennings v. Durden, No. 5D2023-0064 (Fla. 5th DCA May 31, 2024). The opinion carries the legend “Not final until disposition of any timely and authorized motion under Fla. R. App. P. 9.330 or 9.331” and no reporter citation had issued.
The common law doctrine that survived was the special interest doctrine, under which a person with a sufficient stake in a charitable trust may enforce it even though enforcement is ordinarily a matter for the Attorney General. A judge writing separately in the same case put the point about implied repeal more bluntly, observing that the doctrine is one "which no court nor the legislature has discredited or overturned".
Our page on section 736.0405 covers that standing question and what the Legislature did about it the following year.
The other decision citing this section is Roller v. Collins, which invokes it for the same proposition while deciding who may sue on a trust’s behalf.
That litigation has a longer history than the 2024 decision suggests. The same charitable trust reached the First District in 2014, where the Attorney General of Delaware lost on standing, and our page on section 736.0110 sets out both rounds.
A caution about the research, and it is a real one
A search for this section number returns two documents. One of them does not contain the section number anywhere.
The second result is a 2015 Eleventh Circuit decision about attorney fees in the long-running Pottinger litigation over the treatment of homeless people in Miami. We read the whole opinion. Chapter 736 is never mentioned. The only appearance of the digits 736 is a page number inside a citation to a United States Supreme Court case, reported at volume 475, page 717, with a pin cite to page 736.
So the association between that case and this statute did not come from anything in the opinion. It came from the database’s own citation extraction. We record it because the practical lesson generalises. A search result is a claim by a search engine, and confirming the number actually appears in the document is a separate step. It is the step that turns a list of hits into research.
The 2025 amendment
The section was amended in 2025 and now ends with the words including, but not limited to, s. 736.0110(3). That subsection concerns the Attorney General’s power to assert the rights of a qualified beneficiary in relation to a charitable trust, and it was cited in the 2024 decision discussed above.
We checked the session law rather than inferring the change from the current wording, and inspected the enrolled bill as rendered, because underlining and strikethrough do not survive text extraction. The cross-reference is underlined and nothing is struck through, which is the drafting convention for new language. So those words were added in 2025 and the rest of the sentence is as it has stood since 2006.
The same act rewrote section 736.0110(3) itself, adding a paragraph that gives the Florida Attorney General exclusive authority over charitable trust enforcement, and added a matching sentence to section 736.0405(3). The point of the new cross-reference here is to signal that the common law preserved by this section has been modified in that specific area.