The New Land Law

This is one of the first legal textbooks to be published solely on the World Wide Web: it is not intended to publish a printed version (although the Reader is entitled to print out and use parts of it (subject to certain restrictions which you are requested to read). A book designed from the start for publication on the Web has certain advantages over one which is written for publication in printed form and then translated into HTML, the language of the Web. In particular it can be designed to use the hypertext links which are one of the main features of HTML to their best advantage, and it can be updated easily. So far as the reader is concerned a book published on the Web has the additional advantage that both it and any updates to it are free.

A normal legal textbook will usually be divided into several parts: there will be the main text and there will be various appendices setting out, for example, the text of the legislation. The book could be described as being divided horizontally.

A Web book on the other hand can be described as being divided vertically. This particular book is an example of that. It is, broadly speaking, in two parts, the first being the commentary and the second the legislation. Both can be read independently from start to finish but they are also linked with constant cross references, or hypertext links, from one to the other. While reading the commentary on a section of the Act you can use a hypertext link to move to the text of the Section itself and vice versa. The book is similar to printed books, and dissimilar to most other works that have so far appeared on the Web in that it contains tables of contents, cases and statutes and an index. It is dissimilar to them in that it is intended that it will be updated regularly. At the moment it is very much "work in progress" -- the commentary is fairly skimpy -- but it is intended that it will be improved in the future. If there is interest, a mailing list may be set up to send out details of updates.

This book has been made possible by the fact that United Kingdom Statutes are now published on the Internet and that, although Crown Copyright is retained, permission is given by HMSO for them to be used in a value added context such as this.

HTML was not designed for text such as statutes which is divided into clauses, sub-clauses, sub-sub-clauses and sometimes further divisions. The staff, and in particular Robert Stutely, at HMSO have however managed to mark-up the text of the statutes in a way which fairly closely reproduces the text of the Queen's Printers' edition which is a superb achievement.

For the purposes of this book I have, with the permission of HMSO, used the same coding but with some additional and different mark-up. I have also divided the Act up into individual sections, which makes it display faster on slow machines.

The Act itself is the result of two Law Commission Reports published in 1989 dealing with the transfer of land, "Trusts of Land" (Law Com No. 181) and "Overreaching: Beneficiaries in Occupation" (Law Com 188), both of which are now out of print. It received the Royal Assent on the 24th July 1996 and will come into effect on the 1st January 1997.

It has often been said that the purchase of a house is the most expensive purchase that most people will ever make. For this reason the law affecting the ownership of land has been considered of major importance and the drafting of changes in legislation affecting land has been entrusted to eminent practitioners. The principal draftsman of the Conveyancing Act 1881 and the Settled Land Act 1882 was E.P. Wolstenholme and that of the 1925 property legislation was B.L. Cherry, both of whom were conveyancing counsel to the Court ^[1].

It has been said that--

It is not easy to distinguish accurately between real property and conveyancing. In general it can be said that the former is static, the latter dynamic; real property deals with the rights and liabilities of land-owners, conveyancing the art of creating and transferring rights in land. Yet inevitably the two overlap, and often the exact place at which to draw the line is mainly a matter of taste. ^[2]

Those responsible for drafting the Bill which formed the basis for the new Act were eminent and expert in the law of real property. But the majority of them were not practising conveyancers and from time to time this shows in the new legislation. Another problem with the new legislation is that it does not form a self-contained code; it often modifies other Acts, rather than replacing them so it is necessary to look at such earlier Acts to see what the law is.