confidential relation

A fiduciary relation. It is a peculiar relation which exists between client and attorney, principal and agent, principal and surety, landlord and tenant, parent and child, guardian and ward, ancestor and heir, husband and wife, trustee and cestui que trust, executors or administrators and creditors, legatees, or distributees, appointor and appointee under powers, and partners and part owners.

In these and like cases, the law, in order to prevent undue advantage from the unlimited confidence or sense of duty which the relation naturally creates, requires the utmost degree of good faith in all transactions between the parties. It is not confined to any specific association of parties. It appears when the circumstances make it certain that the parties do not deal on equal terms, but on the one side there is an overmastering influence, or, on the other, weakness, dependence, or trust, justifiably reposed. The mere existence of kinship does not, of itself, give rise to such relation. It covers every form of relation between parties wherein confidence is reposed by one in another, and former relies and acts upon representations of the other and is guilty of no derelictions on his own part. Peckham v. Johnson, Tex.Civ. App., 98 S.W.2d 408, 416.

Confidential relations are deemed to arise whenever two persons have come into such a relation that confidence is necessarily reposed by one and the influence which naturally grows out of the confidence is possessed by the other, and this confidence is abused or the influence is exerted to obtain an advantage at expense of confiding party. Ruebsamen v. Maddocks, Me., 340 A.2d 31, 34.

See also fiduciary or confidential relation