Hello Reader, this time Tabir Hukum will discuss about registration of interests in land.
At common law, the right to a legal freehold estate in land was transferred in a ceremony called feoffment by livery of seisin. This ceremony, held on the land itself, gave notice to the community of who claimed rights in the land and who had the obligations of landholding. Equitable estates, could be transferred without these physical ceremonies, and so the transfers could be effected in secret. In 1535, the English Parliament, at the instigation of the King, Henry VIII, tried to prevent secret transfers with passage of the Statute of Enrolments, requiring registration of the commonest form of transfers of title to estates in land. Clever conveyancers, however, quickly developed new forms of transfers to avoid this requirement, and most conveyances of estates in land continued to be recorded only in documents held by the family solicitor, not deposited in any public registry.
Newly-established colonial legislatures usually provided for transfer of estates in land by deed, and public registration of land transfers. Transfers of estates in land by deed were effected by signing, sealing and delivering the deed to the purchaser; registration was not generally necessary to validate the transfer. Registration of the deed or other instrument by which one acquired an interest in the land gave notice to the world of one's interest in the land, and a registered interest, with some exceptions, took priority over an unregistered interest.
REGISTRY SYSTEMS
Ontario and the four Atlantic provinces early in their history established Registries of Deeds, for recording and indexing deeds and other instruments creating interest in land. The registry provides a public repository of documents, with the date of their recording carefully noted. In a registry system, the registrar does not make any assessment of whether the documents in the registry office are valid to create the interests in land they claim to create. That is the responsibility of those who use the documents to establish a chain of title.
The Atlantic provinces indexed the documents in their registry offices by the names of the grantors and grantees, an approach consistent with some older descriptions of parcels of land that identify the parcel by identifying the owners of all of the neighbouring parcels. In Ontario, where much of the land was surveyed before the Crown issued the first Crown grants, the records were usually indexed by lot number, according to tha location of the parcel on a survey grid.
LAND TITLES OR TORRENS SYSTEMS
The Canadian colonies established to the west of Ontario implemented the Land Titles or Torrens system, developed by Sir Robert Torrens and first implemented in the colony of South Australia in 1858. In the Torrens system, the government not only provides a public office for recording interests in land, but investigates the claim made in those documents and guarantees their validity.
Ontario has for many years maintained a land titles registration system alongside an active registry system; beginning in 1999, with the introduction of electronic registration of land-related documents, the province began converting land records from the registry system to the land titles system. Without legislation making registration and conversion compulsory, it may be a long process, as individual owners are reluctant to pay for the extensive title search necessary to prepare a registry title for first registration in a land titles system.
Umpteen posts of tabir hukum about registration of interests in land, hopefully the writing of tabir hukum about registration of interests in land can be beneficial.
Books : In Writing Tabir Hukum :
Alan M. Sinclair and Margaret E. McCallum, 2005. An Introduction to Real Property Law (Fifth Edition). LexisNexis : Canada.
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| Figure Property Law : Ownership, Title and The Limits of Ownership - Registration of Interests in Land |
