ABSTRACT
Reappraisals of parts of the whole, worthwhile on their own account, may also develop skills useful for other projects and may even suggest new approaches to the larger subject. In other words, this is not a reappraisal of the law of property, in the sense of a rethinking of property law in all its aspects. Rules embodying outmoded social policies are slow to disappear, sometimes lingering in obscurity, sometimes gradually modified to serve purposes they were never designed for. The inquiry then moves through successive topics in the law of real property: estates and future interests, concurrent estates, landlord and tenant, servitudes, and conveyancing. The preservation of continuity, sometimes merely verbal; the demand for predictability, in order to allow counseling and planning. The pressure to recognize new social realities, ever appearing and disappearing; the imperative to respond to economic necessities, as perceived by one group or another make property law a bundle of rules rather than a bundle of rights.
