ABSTRACT
The ‘law of real property’ (or land law) is, obviously, concerned with land, rights in or over land, and the processes whereby those rights and interests are created and transferred. It is also important to appreciate why land law is fundamentally different from other legal disciplines, such as the law of contract or the law of tort. Generally, and with some necessary simplification for the purposes of exposition, ‘proprietary rights’ fall into two categories: estates in land and interests in land. Although originally an estate in land, the fee tail is more properly regarded, since January 1926, as an ‘interest’ in another person’s land. In modern land law, the distinction between legal and equitable proprietary rights no longer rests on which type of court hears a case, but it still has a flavour of the old distinction between the formality of the common law and the fairness of equity.
