LAND LAW

Land Law



Table of Contents

Introduction2

Discussion2

Adverse possession:4

Easements by prescription:6

Restrictive Covenants:8

Mortgages:10

Conclusion11

References12

Land Law

Introduction

Land law is the branch of law which deals with the tenure of land provides one of the most interesting fields of political archaeology, since it contains strata from every era of social development, in which are fossilized the legal foliage of former social and economic orders.

As an example of a politically significant transition it is instructive to consider the case of settled land in English law. Originally settled land passed intact to the legal heirs, so that the tenant for life was considered trustee for those who were to succeed him, with no right of use that would enable him to alter their right to the land and its fruits. The Settled Land Acts 1856, 1882 and 1890 established that the interests of the heirs could be 'over-reached', i.e. translated into a money interest, and would automatically be so translated whenever the tenant for life sold the land. Hence - whatever the form of the settlement - there would be no impediment to sale of the land by the present occupant, who would then hold money, rather than land, in trust for his successors. This legislation put land for the first time on an equal footing with all other property as an item of free exchange, so that land becomes simply a special case of capital.

Discussion

Of equal interest is the feudal doctrine, still surviving in UK law, of 'estates in land'. Land, being definitive of jurisdiction, is always held subject to allegiance. However, according to the feudal doctrine, tenure and allegiance follow each other: the obligation owed by the 'tenant in chief' is direct to the sovereign that by the one who holds from the tenant in chief is to him, and so on. One half of this idea survives in the fact that tenure is always a matter of degree, descending from freehold (which is subject only to forfeiture in favour of the sovereign), through leasehold, to sub-tenancies, down to the weakest form of security, known as 'squatter's rights'. This last arises sometimes from prescription, and sometimes from the effect of the Statute of Forcible Entry 1381, which makes it a crime forcibly to evict someone without legal process, and which, has thus protected most kinds of tenancy since the late Middle Ages. Defenders and attackers of private property should attend to the idea, still enshrined in this kind of law, that property rights often exist in varying degrees, and always involve a third term. Besides the person possessing them and the thing in which they are possessed, there is also the sovereign power from which they are held.

As explained in this paper earlier that property rights are very rigid and that the freehold can only be perpetual and that the only term domain may be for a specified period. This is a consequence of the reform of 1925 because until that date were allowed variations on the term of rights, the law changed and there is no ...