The Resurrection of Registration of Title

N A period of readjustment, old ideas which have lost their vogue are likely again to be advocated along with ideas whose main attraction is their novelty. In the dosing years of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth there was considerable agitation in the United States for registration of title to land. In the prosperous twenties, reform was quiescent, and with it the reform of land transfer. But with the collapse of three of the four large New York title insurance corporations as an incident of the great depression, title insurance again came to public attention, and title registration was urged as something better. As a consequence the ghost of title registration again walks in that state. In normal times reform is under a grave disadvantage. Vested interests are entrenched while the main strength of the reform is in the egoism of the reformer. In times of change the advantage is perhaps the other way. But in either case attention is likely to be centered on the special interest of the existing order or on the personality of the reformer rather than on the merits of the case. The merits of either side are likely to be assumed and attention directed at discrediting the other side. So at any rate has it been with registration of title to land. Its advocates have largely assumed its manifest superiority over prevalent systems of recording and have harped on the self-interest of the English solicitors, or in this country on that of the abstracters or the title insurance companies. Self-interest, however, is not always on one side. There is no more insidious self-interest than that of a government department desiring to expand. Such a department exists in England in the Land Registry,' the head of which, the Chief Land Registrar, is appointed by the Chancellor and has his powerful backing. In the United States it is the titlemen and especially the title insurance companies that are accused of self-interest. Their self-interest is manifest. But the failure of past attempts at registration of title cannot altogether be laid to them. Their influence was not * Professor of Law, State University of Iowa.