EQUITABLE ESTATE. An interest in prop erty of such a nature that its enforcement and protection are within the jurisdiction of the courts of equity and not of common law: the right to the beneficial use and enjoyment of property without the legal estate. It is only by a considerable extension of the technical mean ing of the term estate and by analogy that it can be applied to a right of this character. In the primary classification of legal rights as rights in rem and rights in personam—that is, rights in a definite object (in rem certain) avail able against the whole world, and rights available against a particular individual only—property rights form by far the largest, if not the most important, body of rights of the former class. A freehold estate in lands, for example, is not, like a claim founded upon contract, a right against a certain, definite person, but involves the asser tion of an exclusive title and right of possession against any and everybody who may choose to dispute it. Such rights as these are fully recog nized and protected by the courts of common law, by putting the rightful claimant in posses sion of the property and by defending such pos session against all comers, and they are thus ap propriately described as legal estates.
The corresponding equitable right, on the other hand, is not, in our legal system, a right in rein, but only in personam. The beneficiary of the right cannot claim the possession of the property to which it relates, and a trespass upon it is not an injury to him, but to the trustee or other per son in whom the right in rem, the legal title, is vested. The remedy of the beneficiary is confined to the latter, in persona»i, whose administration of such legal estate he is entitled to supervise and control. Clearly, such a right as this lacks the character of property, or of an estate, in the strict sense of those terms. But the expressions 'equitable estate' and 'equitable property' have been found too convenient to be dismissed on technical grounds, and must now be regarded as permanent additions to our legal nomencla ture; in addition to which, the recent fusion of law and equity jurisdiction in England and many of the I:nited States has tended to make the distinction between legal and equitable in terests less important.
The origin of equitable estates is to be found in the ancient practice of conveying lands to the use of a person other than the grantee, which pre vailed in England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By the Statute of Uses, enacted in the twenty-seventh year of Henry VIII. (1535), this practice, which had become so general as to involve most of the lands in the kingdom, was much curtailed, and the system of trusts, as we know them, established. These constitute at the present time by far the greater part of the class of interests known as equitable estates. Rights of an analogous character arise under a great variety of circumstances. Whenever one person has the legal title to property, real or personal, and another is entitled by the aid of equity to compel the conveyance of the property to him self or its administration for his benefit, the lat ter has an equitable estate therein.
Such a right arises in every case where an unexecuted agreement exists for the conveyance or mortgaging of land, or where an attempt to make such a conveyance or mortgage fails through the defective execution of the instrument of as signment. The right to the specific performance of the cont met in the one case, and to compel the due execution of the instruments in the other, whereby the legal title to the property shall be transferred to the beneficiary, constitutes his equitable estate therein. Similar in character is the right known as the equity of redemption, whereby a mortgagor is enabled, after the for feiture of his mortgage, to redeem the mortgaged land or goods from the »mortgagee. The legal title having, by the forfeiture, become completely vested in the latter, the right of redemption pre served by equity to the mortgagor may properly be regarded as a form of equitable estate. The large class of interests of this character known specifically as constructive trusts will be de scribed under the title See also EQUI TABLE EASEMENT; EQUITY ; USES.