This Conveyance

Conveyancing counsel to the court (i.e., to the Chancery Divi sion of the High Court) are certain counsel, in actual practice as conveyancers, of not less than ten years' standing, who are appointed by the lord chancellor, to the number of six, under s. 4o of the Master in Chancery Abolition Act 1852. They are appointed for the purpose of assisting the court in the investigation of the title to any estate, and upon their opinion the court or any judge thereof may act. Any party who objects to the opinion given by any conveyancing counsel may have the point in dispute disposed of by the judge at chambers or in court. Business to be referred to conveyancing counsel is distributed among them in rotation and their fees are regulated by the taxing officers.

International Law.

The law of the place where real estate is situated (lex loci rei sitae) governs its tenure and transfer. The laws of England and of the United States are more strict on this point than the laws of most other countries. They require that the formalities of the locus rei must be observed, even if not neces sary to be observed in the place where the contract was made. The lex loci rei sitae determines what is to be considered real estate. A foreign court cannot as a general rule pass title to land situated in another country. The English and United States courts of equity have to a certain extent avoided the inconvenience which this inability to deal with land out of the jurisdiction sometimes causes, by the theory that equity acts upon the conscience of the party and not upon the title to the foreign land. Thus in the lead ing case of Penn v. Lord Baltimore in 175o (I Vesey 444) the Court of Chancery on this ground decreed specific performance of articles for settling the boundaries of the provinces of Pennsyl vania and Maryland. The difficulties always arise that, although the court professes to act upon the conscience, it must indirectly act upon the property, and that it cannot carry its decision into execution without the aid of the local tribunals.

See W. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England (1896) ; Williams, Law of Real Property (19,26) ; Wolstenholme and Cherry, Convey ancing Statutes (1927) Key and Elphinstone, Precedents in Con veyancing (1927). (B.) The history of real property law as of other branches of law in the American Colonies remains to be written. Some of its more striking features, however, are apparent. There were no published reports and the number of professional lawyers was small. Colonial legislatures were active. Military tenure did not gain a foothold nor did copyhold tenure for whereas copyhold tenure survived in England until Lord Birkenhead's Act in 1922 (Law of Property Act, 1922), it was a tenure that harked back through the manor to the days of serfdom and of the village community and was not susceptible of transplanting. The universal tenure was socage, the least burdensome of the English forms of tenure and marked by small rents and payments on inheritance. So foreign did notions of feudal tenure appear that slight as these burdens were they gave rise or contributed to serious incidents, such as Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia in 1676. It was in the proprietary Colonies

of Maryland and Pennsylvania that feudal tenure was most con spicuous. In both Maryland (Matthews v. Ward [1839], 10 Gill and J. 443) and Pennsylvania (Wallace v. Harmstad [1863], 44 Pa. 499; but see Ingersoll v. Sergeant [1836], 1 Whart. 337), however, it has been declared by the courts that the Revolution did away with tenure. The Pennsylvania decision has been subject to criticism in that State (Sharswood, Law Lectures, p. 220 et seq.), but whether that criticism be justified or not, it is clear that since the Revolution tenure in the United States has been such a shadowy thing as to be practically non-existent.

The changes that were taking place in England were ac celerated by the pioneer conditions in the Colonies. Conveyances were made by deed and while in New York and probably some other jurisdictions the cumbersome lease and release which pre vailed in England for 200 years were used, in most jurisdictions probably a single document was all that was necessary. Some times this was a deed of bargain and sale, sometimes a stat utory deed in which recording took the place of livery of seisin. Registration of deeds, a favourite scheme of the Commonwealth and one which was adopted for the counties of Middlesex and York in England in the first part of the 18th century, early became a part of the common practice in the Colonies and has remained a distinctive feature of real property law in the United States ever since. A single form of action for the recovery of and trial of title to land, usually the action of ejectment, was the common practice in the Colonies. The fictions of ejectment did not appeal to the New England Puritans, however, and in New England there was a revival of at least the names of Old English real actions, but this did not prevent the adoption in Connecticut and Massachusetts of a single statutory form of action at an early period. In South Carolina in 1791 the action of ejectment as the action to try title gave place to a special action of trespass. The common use of a single action for the trial of title and the prevalence of statutes of limitation modeled on that of 2 1 James I.c. 16, with a single period of limitation, usually of 20 years but sometimes as short as seven years, made it hard to think of the statute of limitation as merely cutting off a remedy. It became natural to think of it as affecting the right of property, to think of it as one element in a prescription by which the adverse pos sessor might become the owner of the land. Hence, while in England to-day the statute of limitation as to land is likely to be treated under the general head of limitation of actions, in the United States the statute of limitation as to land is almost certain to be treated under the head of adverse possession. In other words it is treated as one element in the acquisition of property rather than as primarily a matter of procedure.