Full text of 'Part IIntroductory mattersM01SMIT079905SEC01.indd 1000M01SMIT079905SEC01.indd 24/19/12 10:22 AM1Basic property principlesIn this chapter, we will consider some of the basic principles and distinctions to beobserved in property law. Most of them will be further developed in later chapters and,as in many subjects, the basic principles may be more readily comprehended once someof the more detailed material has been considered.1. General principlesWe will investigate ideas of property through two contributions to the literature. These relatespecifically to land, though many of the principles apply to all forms of property.Extract 1.1.1Peter Birks, 'Before We Begin: Five Keys to Land Law', in Land Law: Themes andPerspectives (eds Bright and Dewar) pp 457-463, 467-468, 470-473, 476-486(footnotes omitted)Land Law is a complex subject. It is not in the end a very difficult one. It is less unstable thanother areas of the law.
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- Megarry And Wade The Law Of Real Property Pdf Files 2017
- F R Crane
Yet it is hard to get into. The purpose of this chapter is to make accesseasier. It is impossible to improve access to a completely unknown quantity. The first section,therefore, asks what kind of category we are trying to understand.WHAT KIND OF CATEGORY?The name 'land law' suggests a simple contextual category: all the law about land. The law doesuse many such categories, ordered only by the alphabet: all the law about aviation, banks, com-merce, dogs, education, and so on. They take as their subject some aspect of life, just as anon-lawyer would identify it. But in this case things are not quite so straightforward.
By the endof this section we will have formulated a more complex proposition: land law, as generallyunderstood, is a contextual subset of a legal-conceptual category.The core of land lawA target has a centre. Taking land law as a simple contextual category, we can identify at leastfive topics. Four of these must on reflection be located in the second or third circles, justoutside the bull's-eye at which we are aiming. They matter, but they do not relieve us of theintellectual necessity of mastering the core. Two belong largely in public law.
One of thesecomprises the social control essential if the environment is to be protected. The other is thehousing law which applies to local government tenancies. Within private law, a third unit lies inthe law of civil wrongs and deals with the duties imposed by the law for regulating the behaviourof neighbours towards each other, especially through the torts of nuisance and trespass to land.M01SMIT079905SEC01.indd 3 -f©4 4/19/12 10:22 AM4 Chapter 1 Basic property principlesFourthly, there is the structuring of mega-wealth, the mission of the old Lincoln's Inn con-veyancers. That is breaking away, not specifically land law any longer but wealth management.Its principal vehicle is the trust, often enough offshore, in which land becomes just one kind ofasset in a rolling fund. Fifthly and last of all, there is the unit at the very centre of the target.When lawyers speak of land law, it is usually to this core that they refer.Every business needs premises, every factory needs a site.
For most of us as private individualsour home is the centre of our lives. Functionally, this core of land law has the task of providingthe structure within which people and businesses can safely acquire and exploit land for dailyuse, to live and to work. To discharge that function, it has to have its own conceptual apparatus.The proper content of this fifth unit thus becomes the nature, creation, and protection of interestsin land. Those interests and their implications are the conceptual apparatus of our land law.The word 'interests' is slightly evasive. The law recognizes different kinds of rights, amongthem property rights. By 'interest' we mean 'property right'.
Megarry And Wade The Law Of Real Property Pdf Files Online
The category of all property rights(or, in other words and more simply, 'the law of property') is a legal-conceptual category. It dif-fers from, say, the law of dogs in that its subject is a legal concept, the concept of a proprietaryright. The core of land law is the subset formed when the conceptual category of 'property right'is confined to one context: the law relating to property rights in land. To focus on that core isneither to downgrade the importance of the units in the next circles nor to forget that in real lifeall the units which we have identified, and others, cohere together.Land law in this core sense is, therefore, a contextual subset of a legal-conceptual category.There is a recurrent problem. Property rights in land have roots a millennium deep in a pre-commercial society in which land and wealth were virtually synonymous. The structuring oflanded wealth, and the power that went with it, was then land law's principal mission. The sub-ject of land law - the law, that is, of the recognized proprietary interests in land - is thereforeintellectually entangled in a history not always obviously relevant to its contemporary function.THE FIVE KEYSThe five keys have one-word tags: Time, Space, Reality, Duality, and Formality.
There is apervasive theme which has its own label: Facilitation. This might be said to be the string onwhich the five keys hang. There is also a complication.
All five keys have to be turned together.Exposition is easiest when each point has a natural priority. Here there is no natural priority, andno expository device to achieve what King Arthur intended when he seated his knights at around table.FacilitationSome areas of law are primarily concerned to inhibit undesirable conduct. This is most obviouslytrue of the law relating to wrongs, whether criminal or civil.
Even there, behind the inhibition, liesa facilitative goal - namely, to allow civilized life to be conducted free from the fear of harm. Thewrong of nuisance facilitates the enjoyment of land, but primarily by inhibiting unreasonableinterference. By contrast, other areas are primarily facilitative. The law of contract, for example,helps people do something which by and large they want to be able to do - namely, to makereliable agreements.Like contract, land law is primarily facilitative. Each of the five keys, though some more obvi-ously than others, can be seen as facilitating the achievement of goals which people routinelywant to achieve.A landowner may be willing to pay a large sum for a permanent proprietary right to preventbuilding on the neighbouring land. The first instinct is to facilitate, but there are arguments theother way.
Should he be able to sterilize the economic use of that land? In fact the law doesallow such a right to be created. Restrictive covenants, as property rights, are a relatively newinvention.M01SMIT079905SEC01.indd 4 -f©4 4/19/12 10:22 AM1. General principles 5TIMEAlthough bits do occasionally wash away or slip into the sea, land is in general permanent. Formost human purposes we have to regard it as lasting for ever.
There is a powerful urge to dealin slices of time. It is not confined to land. The institution of the trust makes it relatively easy toturn all kinds of wealth into an enduring fund, and that facility in turn excites and to a degreegratifies the urge to deal in slices of time.
However, it is the natural permanence of land whichmakes slices of time a dominant feature of land law.Two motivationsWhy do people want to deal in slices of time? It is an urge which has been fed from at least twosources.
One is essentially commercial, the other not.The commercial motivationCommercial motivation means, in plain words, the desire to get money out of land. There areall sorts of ways of getting money out of land. For instance, one can farm the land and sell theproduce.
The most extreme method of all is to sell one's whole interest in the land. That meansselling the whole slice of time over which one has control. The largest interest in land - thegreatest slice of time - is 'for ever'.
Megarry And Wade The Law Of Real Property Pdf Files 2017
In everyday conversation I tend to say 'my house' or 'thehouse I own'. In all probability, what I actually have in my house is 'for ever', a slice of timemeasured by the length of time the land will last. There is no harm in calling that ownership.That is what in effect it is. But in the technical language of the law that huge slice of timemeasured by the life of the land itself is called a fee simple. The fee simple in the land on whichmy house stands is worth about £200,000.
I could mortgage it or sell it. But there is anotherpossibility.
I could keep 'for ever' and deal instead in a shorter slice of time.The commercial motivation for dealing in lesser slices of time is to realize in money some of thevalue of the land without giving up one's whole interest. The lease is the proprietary interest whichmost obviously facilitates this. I might let my land for a fixed number of years, say for ten yearsThe family motivationThe primary non-commercial motivation for dealing in slices of time is concern for one's family.In obsolescent aristocratic terms this might be restated as a dynastic motivation. The idea ofbenefiting the different generations of one's family is perfectly natural.The evolution of the doctrine of estatesIn ordinary language the sentence 'Mr Smith has an estate in Suffolk' suggests a goodish patchof Constable landscape of which Mr Smith is the owner.
But in land law an estate is a slice oftime. The doctrine of estates is the learning which tells you what slices of time the law allowsor has allowed a landowner to deal in. A 'life estate' was a recognized estate at common law.SPACEMention of a piece of land by name - as, for example, Lord's Cricket Ground or WembleyStadium - brings to mind an image of the surface of the land. But the surface is merely a cross-section of a space which, in a flat-earthish sort of way, we still think of as stretching infinitelyup and down. Modern cosmology requires modification of the image of that space, but someof the mind's worst problems in comprehending its true shape have been overtaken by muchhumbler science. First balloons and then aeroplanes necessitated a rethink. The tube in whichestates subsist has had to be cut off in order to deprive the surface-owner of exclusive controlof the upper air.M01SMIT079905SEC01.indd 5 -f©4 4/19/12 10:22 AM6 Chapter 1 Basic property principlesREALITYIn the technical language of the law 'real' never denotes the opposite of 'illusory' or 'fake'.
It isusually an anglicization of the adjective from res, which is Latin for 'thing'. Hence, 'real' alwaysindicates that something has some quality of or relation to a thing. If a creditor, about to lendmoney, asks for real security, he means that he wants to be able to turn against a thing for thepurpose of obtaining what is due to him. That contrasts with personal security. A guarantee willallow the creditor an extra recourse, against the person of the guarantor. We could talk about'thing-security' and 'person-security'.
F R Crane
We distinguish instead between real andpersonal security.A lawyer cannot be frightened of technical meanings. It helps, however, if each word pressedinto technical service has just one technical meaning.
Here there is more than one. The law uses'real' to mean 'in some significant way thing-related', but the nature of the relation is not alwaysthe same. Very importantly, there is a difference between the 'reality' which is indicated in thecontrast between real and personal property and the 'reality' indicated in the contrast betweenreal and personal rights. Though the distinction between real and personal property is ancientand venerable, it is nowadays far less important than the distinction between real and personalrights.Realty and personaltyThere is an almost perfect match between the category of real property and land.
If a lay personhears 'real property', or 'real estate', or 'realty', what will come to mind will be an image of land.For most lawyers the effect will be the same. Some lawyers may just manage to remind them-selves that they should be thinking more abstractly, not of the land itself, but of interests in land.' Personal property' or 'personalty' similarly evoke cars, cows, televisions, crockery, pictures,money, and a host of other moveable things. In fact the correlation is not quite perfect. A leaseof land, however long, is technically personalty, and some moveable things are heirlooms andfall within the category of realty. The right to call a parson to the freehold in a church, called anadvowson, was always realty.In what sense is realty 'thing-related' and in what sense are personal things like cars not'thing-related'?. In some actions you could recover the thing itself.
Those actions came to be called'real actions', 'real' meaning 'thing-related' in the simple sense that the person claiming wouldrecover the very thing claimed. It is almost a perfect truth that the category of specific recov-erability extended no further than land. Hence the near-perfect correlation between realty andland.Real rights and personal rightsWe move now to the kind of 'reality' or 'thing-relatedness' which matters in the modern law.The key proposition is that land law is, centrally, the law of real rights in land. The slice of timewhich we call a lease, or, less commonly, a 'term of years', is for historical reasons personaltyor personal property, but it is indisputably a real right in land and as such central to land law.
Afee simple is similarly a real right in land, the greatest of all.People's wealth - their 'property' in the widest sense of that slippery word - consists in rightsof two kinds, real rights and personal rights. It is important to say at once that there are differentways of expressing this distinction. 'Real' and 'personal' here anglicize the Latin labels in remand in personam. Many people prefer to use the Latin labels. The Latin tells us that a right inrem is a right in or against a thing, while a right in personam is a right in or against a person.One can change to different language. A right in personam can be called an obligation. Aright in personam and an obligation are one and the same thing, but looked at from differentends.
I have an overdraft. I owe my bank £1,000. The bank has a right in personam, the personM01SMIT079905SEC01.indd 6 -f©4 4/19/12 10:22 AM1.
General principles 7here being me. I have an obligation to pay. The relationship can be named from either end, andin practice we usually name it from the liability end. Hence we very frequently speak, not of thelaw of personal rights or of rights in personam, but of obligations. As for rights in rem, if we dropboth the Latin and the latinate English, they usually become 'property rights' or 'proprietaryrights'. We sometimes use 'property' loosely to mean 'wealth'.
In that loose sense 'property'wobbles. Sometimes 'my property' evokes and is intended to evoke specific things, such ascars and clothes and cottages. Sometimes, and rather more technically, 'my property' denotesmere rights vested in me, such as a fee simple, a lease, ownership, or the obligations of mydebtors. Whichever the focus, the loose notion of property as wealth is too broad to be usefulin analysis. To think clearly the law has to draw a bright line between two classes of right, bothof which can fall within the loose notion of wealth.The bright line distinguishes between property and obligations.
When that line is drawn,property clearly has a narrower and much more technical sense. Within wealth, taken as includingall assets, the law of obligations is the law of rights in personam and the law of property is thelaw of rights in rem.
Hence a 'property right' or 'proprietary right' is a real right, is a right rem.The law of property is the law of all known real rights, and land law is the law of real rightsin land.What is the difference? The practical difference bears on this question.
Against whom canthe right be demanded? 'Demandability' is intelligible but not really English. But another wordfor 'to demand' is 'to exact', which gives us 'exigible' and 'exigibility'. A right in rem is a rightthe exigibility of which is defined by the location of the thing. The exigibility of a right in personamis defined by the location of the person.
Where I have a right in personam the notional chain inmy hand is tied round that person's neck. Where I have a right in rem, the notional chain in myhand is tied around a thing. Between me and the car which I own there is such a chain.DUALITYThere is duality where a proposition is true in one conceptual dimension but is falsified or heavilymodified in another. Our land law is shot through by instances. There is one of ubiquitous andfundamental importance - namely, the duality between law and equity.
There is another, nowof fading significance, which emanates from tenure. A third consists in the difference betweenbeneficial interests and security interests. A fourth, perhaps inessential at the point of accessto the subject, turns on the relativity of title.Law and equityProprietary rights in land can be legal or equitable. The mind can cope with the proposition thatEnglish law is different from Scots law. It is more difficult to accept the existence within Englishlaw itself of two legal systems with different answers to many questions.
Yet for centuriesthat was the position. The courts of common law administered common law, and the court ofchancery administered its own law, called equity. And on many issues the court of chancerytook a position different from that of the courts of common law. Bleach number one instrumental mp3 download youtube. The institutional duality wasabolished more than a century ago. Modern courts administer both law and equity, and theconflicts' rule laid down by statute is that, where law and equity differ, equity prevails. Theconceptual duality continues.
In some areas it has weakened and will weaken further. But,wherever the law of trusts has a role to play, the duality is here to stay. Where there is a trust,the law says A is owner but equity disagrees and prefers 6.
Or we might put it the other wayabout: wherever equity thinks B should be owner, even though the common law takes adifferent view, there is a trust. A, the owner at common law, becomes a trustee for B.The law of trusts was equity's principal creation, and trusts have become the distinctivefeature of the Anglo-American law of property. Trusts are considered later in this chapter.M01SMIT079905SEC01.indd 7 -f©4 4/19/12 10:22 AM8 Chapter 1 Basic property principlesTenureTenure was once co-equal in importance with estates.
After the Conquest all land was vestedin the king. The king made grants to tenants in chief in return for military and other services. Thetenants in chief subinfeudated to others, and so on, creating the characteristic feudal pyramid.Tenure was the service by which one held one's estate. Different tenures carried different incidents.In 1290 Edward I forbade further subinfeudation of freeholds.
Alienation thenceforth could onlybe by substitution. An alienor had to step out of the pyramid and put the buyer into his place.We need not follow out the rest of the story. We are interested only in the vestiges of tenurewhich survive in the modern law. There are only two points which matter. The most obvious isthat all land is still technically held of the Crown, so that, in the tenurial dimension, it remainstechnically true that only the Crown owns the land. Every fee simple is held of the Crown bya notional tenure involving no services at all. The other is the duality between freehold andleasehold.Beneficial interests and security interestsThis can be dealt with very shortly, though security is an immensely important subject.
The vastmajority of purchases of land are made at least in part with borrowed money, secured on theland which is acquired or on other land. This is common knowledge. The word 'mortgage'covers a variety of differently structured securities. Nowadays the commonest kind is unequivocal,for the mortgagee acquires a right which can only be security interest, 'a charge by way of legalmortgage'.
But it is possible for the same estate to be either a beneficial or a security interest.Historically, the lender-mortgagee took the fee simple. But the proposition that he was tenantin fee simple was heavily qualified by the fact that he held that estate as a security interest, notas a beneficial interest. His fee simple was held subject to the borrower's right to redeem. Since1925 mortgagors no longer transfer the fee simple.Relativity of titleThe interest one holds has to be distinguished from the title by which one holds it. Supposeyou are unlucky enough to take a conveyance of a fee simple from someone who is merely asquatter.
You go into possession of the land. Nemo dat quod non habet. The maxim suggeststhat you have nothing. You took a conveyance from someone who had nothing to give.However, you do have something.
The reason lies in relativity of title. The law will protect a goodtitle against a bad one, and a bad one against a worse one.FORMALITYFormal requirements oblige people to do things in particular ways, usually ways which put themto some slight extra trouble. It might be, for example, that the law would treat a promise asbinding only if you made it meekly kneeling upon your knees. In practice writing and registrationare the formalities usually insisted upon.
There can be lighter and heavier versions of both.What does formality facilitate? What ends does it serve?
Even though it lies outside the landlaw, it is convenient to answer by reference to the best-known formality of all. Everyone knowsthat a last will has to be made in writing and signed before witnesses. It is no use just scribblingit on the back of an envelope or whispering it to one's best friend. There are huge advantagesin this formal requirement. It helps the person making the will think hard about the job to bedone. Later, it goes a long way towards eliminating doubt and argument at a juncture in humanaffairs at which strife is all too near the surface.
All hell would break out if a deceased's last willwere a matter of proving by general evidence, and in the absence of the only person who couldreally know, what the last wishes really were. The formal will settles the matter.It is much the same in land law. There is an extra reason too. It derives from the invisibility ofreal rights. Just as one cannot see a fee simple, so one cannot see an easement or a restrictiveM01SMIT079905SEC01.indd 8 & 4/19/12 10:22 AM1. General principles 9covenant. A neighbour's right to pass over a field does not reveal itself in a pink line, nor willeven an infra-red camera disclose his right to restrict or forbid building.CONCLUSIONThe purpose has been to introduce five aspects of land law, with a view to making access to iteasier.
It was said at the beginning that none of the five has any natural priority. This conclusionsummarizes in slightly different order.(1) It is the business of land law to say what property rights can exist in land.
A property rightis a real right, a right in rem. It has special characteristics, which distinguish it from a personalright, a right in personam.
It is not exigible solely against the person against whom it arose.(2) English law has an inheritance of duality. There are dualities implicit in tenure, in thedifference between security interests and beneficial interests, and in the relativity of title. Butabove all there is the duality between law and equity.
The real rights which land law recognizescan be legal or equitable. In a historically unitary system, equitable rights might be called 'weak'proprietary rights.
Equitable proprietary rights are more vulnerable than legal rights. That is theprice of equity's more relaxed attitude to 'reality'.(3) The value of legal certainty, which the equitable jurisdiction seems on occasion to undermine,is in general reinforced by insistence on the rigour of formality, especially as against strangerswho have given value. Formality has meant writing in one form or another, but nowadays itmeans above all the public registration of real rights in land. The legislator, in providing thatsome interests override the register, has attempted to foresee the cases in which, even againststrangers, the destruction of unregistered interests would give rise to screams of pain.(4) The surface of a piece of land is a cross-section of a space.
Every space has the potentialfor multiple uses. The law goes some way towards allowing those uses to be split up and dealtwith strand by strand. Proprietary facilitation of that goal has to be kept within limits. The some-times obscure nature of those limits is a stumbling block.(5) Time and slices of time have been the dominant theme.
Land law continues to facilitatedealing in slices of time, most obviously through the lease. But the rise of the managed fund ofwealth has brought it about that the long fight over tying up the land itself is no longer fought.The law has seen to it that, behind a trust, such future interests can in general be detached fromthe land to become interests in a fund. A residual facility remains to meet the accommodationneeds of the family through a trust of land. The days have gone when land law's principal missionwas to structure wealth and power.
Institutions and individuals alike, if they have wealth worthplanning, managing, and tying up, prefer trust funds with mixed portfolios.Extract 1.1.2Kevin Gray and Susan Francis Gray, 'The Idea of Property in Land',in Land Law: Themes and Perspectives (eds Bright and Dewar)pp 15-16, 18-21, 27-31, 35-40, 51 (footnotes omitted)It is just over a century since, in a paper still regarded as seminal, Oliver Wendell Holmes observedthat the trouble with law was not that there had been too much theory but rather that there hadnot been enough. We must, therefore, begin with some conceptualization about property.A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO THE JURISPRUDENCE OF PROPERTYFew concepts are quite so fragile, so elusive and so often misused as the idea of property.
Mosteveryday references to property are unreflective, naive and relatively meaningless. Frequently thelay person (and even the lawyer) falls into the trap of supposing the term 'property' to connotethe thing which is the object of 'ownership'. But the beginning of truth about property is theM01SMIT079905SEC01.indd 9 -f©+ 4/19/12 10:22 AM10 Chapter 1 Basic property principlesrealization that property is not a thing but rather a relationship which one has with a thing.
It isinfinitely more accurate, therefore, to say that one has property in a thing than to declare thatthe thing is one's property.To claim 'property' in a resource is, in effect, to assert a strategically important degree ofcontrol over that resource; and to conflate or confuse this relationship of control with the actualthing controlled may often prove to be an analytical error of some substance. 'Property' is,rather, the word used to describe particular concentrations of power over things and resources.The term 'property' is simply an abbreviated reference to a quantum of socially permissiblepower exercised in respect of a socially valued resource.
Used in this way, the word 'property'reflects its semantically correct root by identifying the condition of a particular resource asbeing 'proper' to a particular person. In this deeper sense, as we shall see later, the languageof 'property' may have more in common with 'propriety' than with entitlement; and the notionof a 'property right' may ultimately have more to do with perceptions of 'rightness' than withany understanding of enforceable exclusory title.It may be noted, furthermore, that the power relationship implicit in property is not absolutebut relative: there may well be gradations of 'property' in a resource. Far from being a mono-lithic notion of standard content and invariable intensity, 'property' thus turns out to have analmost infinitely gradable quality.
And it follows, moreover, that to have 'property' in a resourcemay often be entirely consistent with the acquisition or retention by others of 'property' in thesame resource. It is, in fact, the complex interrelation of these myriad gradations of 'property'which comprises the stuff of modern land law.AMBIVALENT CONCEPTUAL MODELS OF PROPERTYThe task of the present chapter is to outline the various ways in which English law - andperhaps, more generally, common law jurisprudence - handles the idea of property in land.It will be argued that our dominant models of property in land fluctuate inconsistently betweenthree rather different perspectives. It will be suggested that this doctrinal uncertainty - this deepstructural indeterminacy - explains the intractable nature of some of land law's classic dilem-mas, whilst simultaneously impeding constructive responses to the more immediately pressingchallenges of twenty-first century land law. The common law world has never really resolvedwhether property in land is to be understood in terms of empirical facts, artificially definedrights, or duty-laden allocations of social utility. Although these three perspectives sometimesinteract and overlap, it remains ultimately unclear whether the substance of property resides inthe raw data of human conduct or in essentially positive claims of abstract entitlement or in thesocially directed control of land use. In short, the idea of property in land oscillates ambivalentlybetween the behavioural, the conceptual, and the obligational, between competing models ofproperty as a fact, property as a right, and property as a responsibility.Property as a factMuch of the genius of the common law derives from a rough-and-ready grasp of the empiricalrealities of life. According to this perspective, the identification of property in land is an earthilypragmatic affair.
There is a deeply anti-intellectual streak in the common law tradition whichcares little for grand or abstract theories of ownership, preferring to fasten instead upon the raworganic facts of human behaviour.Throughout the history of English land law the operative concept has been possession ratherthan ownership: the common lawyer's overwhelming concern has been with the externallyverifiable modalities of possessory control. Indeed, the property of estate ownership is ultimatelya derivative of 'exclusive possession', a phrase used in English law to denote not merely anexclusive factual presence upon land but also some inner assumption as to the power relationshipsM01SMIT079905SEC01.indd 10 -f©4 4/19/12 10:22 AM1. General principles 1 1generated by such presence. Correspondingly, the absence of estate ownership is epitomizedin the 'property deficit' inherent, for instance, in the status of the mere 'lodger'. The lodger,unlike the tenant, is subject to the supervisory authority of the owner, who at all times 'retainshis character of master of the house, and.
Retains the general control and dominion over thewhole house'.Property as a rightThe foregoing analysis of the law of real property has concentrated on property in land as aperception of socially constituted fact. A rather different - and not entirely consistent - focus isprovided by the competing assessment of property in land as comprising various assortmentsof artificially defined jural right. On this view, the law of real property becomes distanced fromthe physical reality of land and enters a world of conceptual - indeed some would say virtuallymathematical - abstraction. In sharp contrast to the crudely empirical foundations of propertyas a fact, the vision of property as a right rests upon a complex calculus of carefully calibrated'estates' and 'interests' in land, all underpinned by the political theory implicit in the doctrine oftenure. All property relationships with land are, accordingly, analysed at one remove - throughthe intermediacy of an estate or interest in land.
No citizen can claim that he or she owns thephysical solum, merely that he or she owns some unitary jural right in or over that solum. Onehas 'property' in an abstract right rather than 'property' in a physical thing. The Crown's radical title is, in truth, no proprietary title at all, but merely an expression ofthe Realpolitik which served historically to hold together the theory of tenure.
£286.00 + £28.60 VATNow in its 9th Edition, Megarry and Wade: The Law of Real Property provides a comprehensive and authoritative coverage of all aspects of the contemporary law of real property.It covers the whole of the English law of real property, together with related subjects such as conveyancing, leases and wills and intestacy, in a single volume. Due to the book’s long history and its association with Sir Robert Megarry V.C.