APPORTIONMENT is a legal term derived from the 4 and 5 Will. IV. c. 22, called the A. act, which has given rise to much litigation in England and Scotland, and the principle of which may be stated to be this—that in the event of the termination of a life•interest by death, or of a more limited interest at a fixed period, the current rent or income shall be apportioned or paid over in such a way as to give the.personal repre sentatives of the party, or the party himself, as the case may be, a sum corresponding to the period that may have elapsed between the last date of payment and the death or other determination of the interest or estate. But the act has no application to annual sums payable by any policy of assurance, nor to any case in which a stipulation has been made that no A. shall take place.
This act was not understood to apply to Scotland till the Year 1844, when it was decided by the court of session that it did so apply, and the juilgmeut was afterwards affirmed by the house of lords. But, in consequence of the act being expressed exclusively in the technical phraseology of the law of England, it has given much trouble. And a later act of 33 and 34 Viet. c. 35, extends the principle to all rents, annuities, salaries, pensions, dividends, and other periodical payments, in the nature of income. so that all
these now, like interest on money lent, are considered as accruing from day to day. When a person therefore dies, the income is counted up to the day of death, and is pay able at the same time as the next quarterly or other payment would be if • no death had happened.
In English law, A. also takes place where the tenant, under a lease, has been deprived of part of the land out of which the rent issues, by a person having a better title than that of the lessor, or proprietor, or where part of the rent has been surrendered by the • tenant to the lessor, or where the lessor has disposed of the reversion as to part. But where the tenant has been wrongfully deprived by the act of the landlord himself. even of a part of the premises, there can be no A., but the whole rent will be suspended so long as such a state of things continues.
A. also obtains in the case of a conveyance of land to which the common of pasture is an appurtenance, the party getting the laud being entitled to a proportionate use of the common