Conveyancing

Abstract: Introduction. Tenures. Estates. Possession of Land. Law and Equity. Legislative Transformation of the Law of Real Property and the Protection of Estates and Interests. Registration of Title. Unregistered Conveyancing: Titles and Incumbrances. Perpetuities and Accumulations. The Use of Trusts in the Law of Real Property. Creating Trusts of Land. The Trusts of Land and Appointment of Trustees Act 1996. Co-ownership. Wills and Intestacy. Contracts of Sale. Proprietary Estoppel. The Nature and Creation of Leases. Determination of Leases. Common Obligations of Landlord and Tenant Leasehold Covenants. Leasehold Conveyancing. Security of Tenure. Fixtures. The Nature and Creation of Mortgages and Charges. The Rights of the Parties under a Mortgage or Charge. Priority of Mortgages. Nature of Easements and Profits. The Creation of Easements and Profits. Species of Easements and Profits. Other Incorporeal Hereditaments. Freehold Covenants. Commonhold. Licenses. Adverse Possession and Limitation. Disabilities.

Abstract: This chapter deals with several aspects of common law during the medieval period in England such as law libraries, law cases and readings, law books and practice manuals, the law book trade including press and printing, and the legal profession itself. There were no common-law libraries comparable with those of the universities or large monasteries. The Inns of Court had nascent libraries around 1500, but few books in them, not all legal. Lawyers went on reporting current cases in manuscript, and some collections reaching back into the 1530s and 1540s were printed in later times. The first requirement for any common lawyer was a knowledge of the writs and forms of action whereby justice was distributed through the royal courts. Precedents of conveyancing and pleading were made by lawyers for their own use, the former largely by lowly practitioners, the latter (in the form of Latin books of entries) by prothonotaries and clerks.

Abstract: When English administrative law is accused of being atheoretical, many read this as a reverse compliment. The pragmatic quality of the common law, rooted (in the famous phrase') in experience rather than logic, is a matter for selfcongratulation. The emphasis on the practical is what has maintained the flexibility of the common law and provided its capacity for incremental change, enabling it to keep in touch with the men and women on the Brussels shuttleservice. As Neil MacCormick, exploring the role of contemporary legal philosophy, once put it, bus-driving is what bus-drivers do, conveyancing is what lawyers do and both 'will do it regardless of any philosophical fuss'.' Theorizing, on the other hand, is what philosophers do and they are welcome to get on with it. How could philosophy be of use to a bus-driver? And would anyone wish to board a bus driven by a philosopher? It is hard to say whether this scepticism is, as some think, an essential component of the dominant tradition of legal positivism,3 or simply an example of English anti-intellectualism. Lord Reid, another Scot, once encapsulated the English attitude to law in the aphorism that 'An ounce of fact is worth a ton of theory'.4 This acknowledged anti-theoretical bias in the common law mind-set is nicely conveyed by the prestigious Hamlyn Lectures, a truly Diceyan series endowed for the glorification of the English

Abstract: The archaic symbolism of mediaeval conveyancing ritual, with its paraphernalia of swords and cut turf, may yet have had something in common with the modern bureaucratic routine of land transfer. The mediaeval context, in which the facturn of a conveyance was symbolised by a sword or parchment, presupposed the existence of a resource of memory.’ Although that resource is now constituted and exploited in a quite different manner, memory nevertheless survives as a basic presupposition of conveyancing. Symbolic knives warranted titles only because they were fixed as reference points within a mediaeval art of recollection, which recorded cultural events by associating them metaphorically or metonymically with things and their images.2 The fact of a conveyance lived on, marked in memory by its association with the symbolic object, which also served as the agent of recall. In broader terms, memory was a resource of trust. A title to land was a fragile commodity, which depended for its stability upon the vicissitudes of recollection: to buy a title was to make an investment of trust in these conditions of continuity. One way of representing the ascent of the bureaucratic form of land transfer is to see it as a reconstitution of this resource. Registration removes titles from networks of organic or practical memory, and deposits them in an administrative archive, accessible and decipherable by reference only to the index of the archive. The advent of trust in writing3 was the essential stage in this reconstruction of the repository of memory. This initial move from a pre-literate mentality in which the sacred object, seal or charter were symbols which attracted and prompted recollection, to an order in which the written charter acquired its own memory and began to speak for itself has defined the general course of land transfer law. Subsequent refinements, notably the rules and principles of construction which constituted the code of contract and conveyance, may be seen as attempts to consolidate the authority of writing, to make the document the only voice of memory or the only authentic witness to a transaction. Before the culture of registration took root, there was a certain ambivalence about this valorisation of paper. In fact it was useful, if somewhat paradoxical, to maintain a tension between paper and land. The distance between the claims made by the paper and the evidence which might potentially be unearthed through an inspection of land or an investigation of pedigrees allowed paper and land to be interpreted as checks on each other. Registration sought entirely to remove property from its natural