LAND TITLES. The ownership of land, being the ownership of the source and scene of all property and all life, must necessarily be of a complex and in some aspects purely notional character. Its value, its immobility, its permanence, its variety of uses and relationships, give it a totally distinctive character and render it peculiarly liable to complication, doubt and dispute. In the case of goods, for instance, possession may ordinarily be relied on as proof of full ownership ; in the case of land, the person in possession is seldom the owner, he is usually only a tenant, paying rent to someone else. Even the person to whom the rent is paid is in many cases—probably, in England, in most cases—not the full owner, but only a life owner, or a trustee, whose powers of disposing of the property are of a strictly limited nature. Again, goods are very seldom the subject of a mortgage, whereas land has from time immemorial been the fre quent subject of this class of transaction, which, if left undis covered, might afterwards deprive the purchaser of a large part or even the whole of the value of his purchase.
Apart from very early and primitive social conditions, there appear to be only two ways in which the required certainty as to title to land can be obtained. Either (I) the purchaser must satisfy himself, by an exhaustive scrutiny and review of all the deeds, wills, marriages, heirships and other documents and events by which the property has been conveyed, mortgaged, leased, devised or transmitted during a considerable period of time, that no loophole exists whereby an adverse claim can enter or be made good—this is called the system of Private Investigation of Title—or (2) the Government must keep an authoritative list or register of the properties within its jurisdiction, together with the names of the owners and particulars of the encumbrances in each case, and must protect purchasers and others dealing with land, on the faith of this register, from all adverse claims. This second system is called Registration of Title. It would seem fairly obvious that the latter system, if efficiently and economically ad ministered, would be safer, cheaper and more expeditious than the former, and so in fact it has proved in all cases where it has been established on an adequate scale to afford a proper com parison. The Private Investigation system may or may not be
assisted by the Government setting up a Register of Deeds. This is done in nearly all civilized countries except England, where it is confined to two counties—Yorkshire and Middlesex. It consists in the establishment of public offices in which all documents affecting land are to be recorded—partly to preserve them in a readily ac cessible place, partly to prevent the possibility of any material deed or document being dishonestly concealed by a vendor. Where registration is effected by depositing a full copy of the deed, it also renders the subsequent falsification of the original document dangerous. In some countries registration is essential to the legal validity of a deed; in others registration only confers priority over an unregistered one.
Another expedient for getting over some of the worst draw backs of the Private Investigation system has been adopted on a large scale in the United States, namely Insurance of Title (q.v.). An insurance company investigates in the ordinary way, charging a premium for the trouble and risk of error.
One other matter of principle—recognized in some form or other by all systems—is that title can be acquired (or lost) by the mere fact of possession (or the want of it) continued for a considerable time. This is called Prescription (q.v.). In English law it takes mostly a negative rather than a positive form, and is called Limitations of Actions. This consists in the deprivation one after another of the rights of possible adverse individual claimants rather than the acquisition by the possessor of an independent right, good against all the world, to which alone the term prescription exactly applies. Where there are dormant rights (e.g., the remainder on an estate tail or on a long term of years) it may be a very long time before all such claims are effectively barred. Scotland, South Africa and most European countries recognize prescription in the more exact sense.