A Treatise on the Law of Record of Title of Real and Personal Property

PREFACE.'

The matter of Registration of Title has been heretofore treated only as a branch of the general law of real and personal property, of conveyances, and of the doctrine of notice. With the growth of statutes and the multiplication of decisions, however, the subject has now reached an importance and bulk such as properly demands for it a separate work, and hence this book has been written.

The decisions arising under the recording acts have been well said to be "exceedingly numerous and often involving questions of great magnitude and importance." The statutes are being constantly extended, altered and modified by the legislatures of nearly fifty states and territories, and upon these numerous statutes, more or less variant from each other, many courts are adjudicating, so that to the growing diversities of legislation are added the increasing diversities of judicial decision; and with the result that out of the very large number of cases that have accumulated, conflicting, and apparently conflicting, opinions can now be arrayed on either side of nearly all the numerous questions that reasonably arise.

It is true that a common purpose and design pervades all of these registry acts, and that this conflict of decision is often more apparent than real, and can in many instances be reconciled by a careful comparison of differences in the underlying statutes, yet this helps but little to relieve the

matter of practical difficulty, as such investigation requires time and labor, and a readier access to the statutes and reports of the various states than attorneys ordinarily possess.

It is a matter of regret that there is to be found among the statutes of the several states as needless and vexatious a diversity as exists in respect to their registry laws, and one of the incentives to this work has been the hope that a collation and comparison of the decisions and statutes on the subject, such as is here presented, may aid to some extent in bringing about greater uniformity in our laws relating to the record of title. Throughout the work those statutes and decisions that tend toward simplicity and uniformity are pointed out as presenting the better law, whether supported or not by the greater weight of precedent.

The design of the work has been to state only general principles in the text, as far as this was practicable; and in the notes to give points of illustration and minor qualification, and decisions resting principally on special provision or phraseology of statute.

It may be thought that in some instances the citations of cases in the notes are needlessly full; but there are many states, and each lawyer or judge will prefer to find, in relation to any point worth examining, proper reference to at least one or two decisions by the courts of his own state. Care has been taken to avoid citing on any one point a needless number of cases from the same state. The parallel references to the American Decisions, the American Reports and the current series of the Reporter system, it is hoped will prove a convenience to the profession, and add to the practical usefulness of the work.

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