Objects, subjects, and types of possessory interests in property
The discussion of property hinges on identifying the objects (things) and subjects (persons and groups) of the jural relationships with regard to things in Western legal systems generally. There follows a treatment of possession and ownership, categories that are closely related historically in the West. Then the discussion deals with divisions of ownership and in so doing contrasts the divided ownership system of the Anglo-American law with the devices in the civil-law system that achieve many of the same practical results while employing a quite different set of concepts. The section closes with the procedural protection of property interests.
Objects: What can be the object of property?
Classification of “things”
Anglo-American law is generally less concerned with matters of definition than is the civil law. Except in the United States, where defining something as property automatically entitles it to constitutional protection, there is less discussion in the Anglo-American legal system of whether a given interest or a given thing should be classified as property. Nonetheless, Anglo-American law shows broadly the same characteristics as the civil law. Almost all tangible things are conceived of as being capable of supporting property interests; some intangibles are treated the same as tangibles, and some are not.
Water and the land under and bordering on water are everywhere in the West treated differently from other kinds of property. Modern law in the West tends to give substantial power over water and land near water to the state. Beyond that the regimes vary substantially from jurisdiction to jurisdiction (see riparian right; territorial waters).
The United States has a well-developed law concerning the taking of water from a navigable or nonnavigable stream. In the eastern part of the United States the right to take water from a stream is dependent on ownership of lands adjoining the stream. In the western part of the country the right to take water tends to depend on having first taken it (prior appropriation). In both parts of the country public regulation has increasingly come to the fore.
Other natural resources
Other natural resources have, in some Western legal systems, been removed from normal private ownership. The tendency on the Continent is to make all minerals subject to state ownership or at least to extensive state control. Historically in England gold, silver, and lead were reserved to the crown. In the United States private ownership of minerals has been the rule, subject to considerable state regulation in the name of conservation. Just as the systems of private ownership with regard to water have tended to divide between those systems that award the water to the person who has it on his land and those that award it to the person who discovered or appropriated it, so too those Western systems that allow private ownership of minerals alternate between giving them to the landowner and giving them to the discoverer.
The human body
Throughout the West the human body, living or dead, is not an object of private property. This fact has raised difficulties in many legal systems. For example, if the human body is not property, the question arises of what is happening when someone makes a gift of or sells blood or bodily organs or makes a testamentary disposition of his body for medical purposes. Many jurisdictions have special legislation on this topic, but the conceptual difficulty is by no means resolved.
Possession of tangible things
Possession of a tangible thing is, at least in the West, a concept that antedates conscious thought about law. Possession is a fact, the Roman jurists said, formed of an intention and a thing (animus et corpus). The thing was basically anything that was capable of being physically possessed; the intention was to hold it as one’s own.
English law also had to deal with a fairly complicated social fact, seisin, the process by which a lord put his man in possession of a tenement. In English law the concept of seisin was also applied to tangible things other than land, things that were not subject to lordship.
Any legal system that begins its property law with a concept of possession is going to have a property law biased in favour of tangible things. It is easy for Westerners to conceive of possessing almost anything that can be touched. It is far more difficult to conceive of possessing an abstraction like a right, a privilege, or a power. Westerners who are not lawyers will say that they possess their watches or their land; they will rarely say that they possess their bank accounts or the power to convey their land.
Possession of intangible things
Civil law, following Roman, has tended to deny the possibility of legal possession of anything that cannot be touched. English and American law, by contrast, generally are more open to the notion that one may be possessed of a right, a power, or a privilege.
Because possession is so fundamental to property in both Anglo-American and the civil law, the civil-law systems’ greater reluctance to recognize possessory interests in intangibles has important consequences for the way the two systems conceive of property rights. In the case of land, civil law tends to give possession to the owner of the land and to be reluctant to recognize property rights in anyone other than the owner. Anglo-American law, however, recognizes multiple possessory rights in land and hence tends to speak not of ownership of the land but of ownership of an interest in land—i.e., of an intangible legal abstraction in a tangible thing.
Government-granted rights as property
The types of intangible rights granted by governments expanded greatly in the 19th and 20th centuries. The oldest of these are the exclusive rights given by states and international bodies to encourage and protect authors, inventors, manufacturers, and tradesmen. Copyright, the exclusive right to prohibit the copying of a piece of writing or a work of art or music, is almost universally regarded as a property right. In most Western systems copyrights are freely assignable. They are normally protected against state interference in the manner of other forms of property. Patents, the government-granted right to the exclusive use of an invention, and trademarks, the government-granted exclusive right to market one’s product with a given distinctive sign or symbol indicating its source, receive similar treatment in most Western countries.
In the United States it seems clear that the legislature may make a grant to an individual or group of individuals in such a way as to entitle that individual to property protection in the grant. The grant may then not be taken away without due process of law in a procedural sense. The grant may even be made in such a way that it cannot be taken without the payment of compensation. In other countries in the West the courts have been less involved in these public-law programs. It is perhaps all the more notable, therefore, that throughout the West there has been a tendency in recent years to make at least certain kinds of government grants more secure. As a general matter, government grants can be taken away for fewer reasons, and the process by which they can be taken away has become more elaborate.
The same tendency toward property-like treatment is also noticeable throughout the West with regard to certain kinds of arrangements between private citizens. Landlord-tenant law, for example, a traditional topic of property law at least in the descriptive sense, has tended to give greater security to the tenant (see below Landlord and tenant). Western law has also tended to give greater security to employees (who are not the holders of property rights even in the descriptive sense), requiring, for example, that an employer justify discharging a long-term employee.
Movable and immovable property
If the distinction between tangible and intangible property has become increasingly blurred in Western law and if the category of intangible property seems to be increasingly expanding, the distinction between movable and immovable tangible things has remained relatively fixed. As noted above, Anglo-American property law began as a law concerning land. The actions that protected interests in land were “real” actions, both in the sense that the interest claimed was notionally good against the whole world and in the sense that the remedy afforded was the recovery of the land itself or the interest claimed in it. Movable objects, by contrast, were protected by “personal” actions, both in the sense that one had to allege that the defendant had committed some wrong in order to recover and in the sense that money damages, not specific recovery of the thing, were normally the only available remedy. Reflecting these two types of actions, immovable property (such as a permanent building) came to be called real property, and movable property (such as personal possessions), personal property (see real and personal property).
Beginning from a law that made a radical distinction between interests in land and all other kinds of property, modern Anglo-American law has gradually come to view both kinds of property as similar. There remain, however, in many jurisdictions distinctions between the two that are more the product of the historical development than they are of any modern functional distinction. In almost all Anglo-American jurisdictions, for example, different forms of conveyance are used depending on whether the property conveyed is real or personal. The types of interests that may be recognized in the two also vary in many Anglo-American jurisdictions.Modern civil law also recognizes the distinction between movables and immovables. In Germany, for example, the distinction forms the main division of property law, and modern Russian law similarly divides property between movables and immovables. By and large, however, the civil law has followed Roman law in minimizing the distinction. Certain types of privileges of use are recognized only in land, but these tend to be interests that could not be had in a movable good, such as a right-of-way or a privilege to build. Conveyance of land may be somewhat different, but not radically different, from conveyance of movables. Statutes of limitation or periods of prescription may be longer for land than for movables. On the whole, however, the differences are not so great as they are in Anglo-American law.
Subjects: who can be an owner?
Just as the range of permissible objects of property has been affected by the distinction between property-as-commodity (property as wealth) and property-as-propriety (property as the material foundation of the good—i.e., proper—society), the topic of the subjects of property rights has been greatly affected by the agglomerative tendency. Both Anglo-American and civil law sought a single legal person in whom the vast complex of property rights, privileges, and powers could be said to reside. Historical shifts in the law of persons (the recognition, for example, of more persons as being of equal status before the law) have created more persons to whom the agglomerative tendency could attach but have not defeated the tendency. The fact that modern law freely allows the creation of fictitious legal persons (corporations) has, if anything, exaggerated the tendency.
In both Anglo-American and civil law the paradigmatic holder of property is a single human person. The fact that in the West today far more wealth is held in some form of co-ownership or corporate ownership has not yet affected this paradigm.
Limitations still exist on property-holding capacity and on the capacity to deal with property. Thus, many jurisdictions still limit, in some way, the property-holding capacity of noncitizens. Many of the Western countries that have indigenous non-Western peoples living among them have separate rules concerning these peoples’ property-holding capacity. Such regimes exist, for example, for American Indians who reside on reservations, at least with regard to tribal land. In non-Western countries (e.g., Malaysia) that impose restrictions on the use or development of land by noncitizens, some restrictions apply only to agricultural land, while others are much broader in scope.
Many citizens who are legally capable of holding property are not legally capable of dealing with it. In Western legal systems generally, children are recognized as capable of owning property, but they cannot deal with it without the consent of their parents or guardians. All Western legal systems have procedures whereby incompetent adults can be deprived of their capacity to deal with property. These procedures generally provide for the appointment of a guardian for the incompetent; the guardian is authorized to deal with the property on the incompetent’s behalf.
Restrictions on both the property-holding capacity and the capacity to deal with property of competent adult women have largely been abolished in the West. Marital property regimes differ substantially, however, and although laws in the late 20th and early 21st centuries tended toward equalizing the powers of husband and wife, full equalization of the power to deal with marital property is not the norm in all Western jurisdictions.
Despite the tendency of Western legal systems to regard individual ownership as paradigmatic, all Western legal systems allow a number of different forms of group ownership. The categories offered below are not exhaustive, but they give some notion of the various forms of group ownership that may exist.
All Western legal systems recognize that a group of individuals may each have an undivided ownership interest in a thing. This is the norm, for example, when property is inherited by a group of siblings from a parent, but it is also possible for an individual owner to sell or give a piece of property to a group.
The two most commonly recognized forms of co-ownership in Anglo-American jurisdictions are joint tenancy and tenancy in common. In both forms each tenant has the right to possess and the privilege to use the whole thing. If it is physically impracticable for them all to possess or to use the thing, they must agree among themselves who will have possession in fact, since all have possession in law. If they cannot agree, one or more of them may petition the court to have the thing partitioned among them. If partition in kind cannot be had, the court will order the thing sold and the proceeds divided among the erstwhile cotenants.
The two forms of cotenancy differ when it comes to succession and to the power to convey. In joint tenancy, if one of the joint tenants dies, the remaining tenants succeed to his share (also known as moiety, or “half”). In tenancy in common, if one of the tenants dies, his heirs or devisees succeed to his moiety. In joint tenancy, if one of the joint tenants conveys his moiety inter vivos (e.g., through a living trust), the conveyance destroys the survivorship interest of his cotenants so far as that moiety is concerned. The conveyee takes not as a joint tenant but as a tenant in common with the other tenants. In tenancy in common, however, conveyance operates like succession. The conveyee takes the same undivided interest that the conveying tenant had.
Civil-law systems recognize a form of co-ownership similar to the Anglo-American tenancy in common. It is not possible in the civil-law systems to hold property in a form in which one’s cotenants automatically succeed to it. French law, like Anglo-American, allows co-owners to demand partition of a cotenancy and is hostile to attempts to restrict this power. German law, however, has a form of cotenancy (Gesamthandeigentum) in which the cotenants cannot partition the tenancy property, although they may alienate their shares. This form of cotenancy is used for many kinds of partnerships, including the partnership of coheirs that exists until the deceased’s estate is settled and divided.
At English common law, partners held partnership property in their individual capacities. They were obliged to account to their partners for profits earned from it, but the ownership interest was in the partner individually, not in the partnership. The common-law rule prevails in England today. In many American jurisdictions, however, legislation allows the partners to hold partnership property in a form of cotenancy, known as tenancy in partnership, which is quite similar to the German Gesamthandeigentum. Roman law treated ownership by partners in a way similar to the English common law, but that rule has, in general, not survived in the modern civil law. Those civil-law countries that do not recognize a form of ownership like the Gesamthandeigentum tend, like the French, to recognize the property-holding capacity of the partnership itself. Thus, partnerships in these countries are treated like corporations for property-holding purposes (see below Corporate owners).
English common law adopted a regime of separate marital property in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. The wife had her property, the husband his. The only things that they owned together were things that had been conveyed to them together in a form of tenancy known as tenancy by the entirety (which still exists in a number of American jurisdictions). Tenancy by entirety is like joint tenancy in that the surviving spouse takes the whole of the property upon the death of the other spouse. It differs from joint tenancy in that it is not possible for one of the spouses to convey his or her interest so as to defeat the survivorship right of the other.
In the latter half of the 20th century, movements for the equality of women wrought a major change in this system. Most American jurisdictions now provide for a nonbarrable statutory elective share. A typical statute treatment gives a spouse a right to renounce any provision made in the deceased spouse’s will and to take instead a statutorily fixed fraction (typically one-third) of the deceased’s estate. In the civil-law jurisdictions and in a small number of U.S. states, a different system of marital property prevails. As in the common-law system, husband and wife each have their separate property, but this is only the property they had prior to the marriage or property they received by gift or inheritance during the marriage. All property that is the result of earnings of either spouse during the marriage is community property, as are, in some of the civil-law jurisdictions, all movables. Separate property descends to the heirs of the spouse who holds the property, but community property is generally divided in half upon the death of the first spouse to die. Half of it goes to the surviving spouse and half of it to the heirs of the first-dying spouse. Other community-property jurisdictions give the first-dying spouse’s portion of the community to the surviving spouse, at least in the absence of a testamentary disposition to the contrary.
Both the common-law and the community-property systems arose at a time when divorce was not as common as it is today. In common-law property jurisdictions the tendency now is to allow the judge wide discretion to divide the property of a divorcing couple without regard to who holds title to what. In community-property jurisdictions the tendency is to divide the community and to leave the separate property with the spouse who has title to it.
The importance of marital property for the concept of property in the West cannot be overestimated. Although spouses have some power to change their marital property arrangements by private agreement, most married people in the West today live under a regime either of community property or of separate property subject to division upon divorce and to a forced share in the surviving spouse. One might well question to what extent any Westerner who is married can be said to have individual property when his or her spouse has so much of a stake in it.
Throughout the West the vast bulk of productive assets are owned by fictitious legal persons such as corporations, sociétés, and Gesellschaften, created under general incorporation statutes that allow such fictitious legal persons to engage in a wide variety of profit making and, frequently, eleemosynary (related) endeavours. This development is relatively recent, but it is so common today that it needs hardly to be stated.
If one asks who has the right to possession, privilege to use, and power to convey property of a corporation, the legal answer is that the corporation does, just as if it were an individual. But a corporation is not an individual; people act collectively through a corporation. The seeming simplicity of corporate ownership masks a variety of interests.
Community or state owners
In every Western legal system certain tangible things, such as water, air, or wild animals, are withdrawn from private ownership. Modern Western law tends to regard these things as belonging to the state or the community.
Furthermore, certain things that are not withdrawn from private ownership can at any time happen to belong to the community, to the state, or to some governmental entity. Some of these things, like public highways or public parks, may be open to the public generally, at least under certain conditions; some of them may be owned by the state in a manner quite similar to things that are in private ownership, like government office buildings or government-owned enterprises.
The community or the state may have interests in things that are owned privately by someone else. Offensive land uses may be abated by a public officer acting on behalf of the community or, in some situations, by any affected member of the community suing as private attorney general on behalf of the community. The number and types of land uses that are deemed offensive have increased notably throughout the West with the increase in concern about the environment (see below Environmental and historical controls).
The state may acquire ownership over privately owned assets, or discrete interests in assets, through exercise of its power of eminent domain. Where it exercises this power, the state is required, typically by an express provision in its constitution, to pay compensation to the owner. (See below Eminent domain.)
Finally, former communist countries continue to permit, as the West does, state ownership. In Russia, for example, two forms of ownership are recognized: private and public. Public ownership refers to ownership by the state, whether at the federal, state, or municipal level.
Unitary and nonunitary concepts of ownership
In the civil-law tradition the ownership concept is understood in a unitary fashion. Civilians (including those in postcommunist legal systems such as Russia’s) commonly refer to the “triad of ownership,” which comprises the owner’s rights to possess, use, and dispose of a thing. In this respect the civilian conception of ownership probably is closer to that held by ordinary nonlawyers than is the Anglo-American conception.
Within the common-law world, ownership is not understood as a unitary concept. Instead, Anglo-American lawyers think of ownership in terms of a “bundle of rights.” This widely used metaphor refers to two features of ownership. The first is the possibility that ownership may be fragmented. The object of ownership—the “thing”—can be owned by more than one person, thereby focusing attention on what specific limited rights each of the various co-owners has with respect to the thing. The second feature is similar to the first, in that it emphasizes the different rights that various individuals may simultaneously have with respect to the thing. Thus, while the person who is colloquially known as “the owner” may simultaneously have the right to possess, use, and dispose of the thing, in fact one or more of these rights may be held by another person. For example, in many U.S. states the person who holds the mortgage to a house is technically considered the legal owner of the house, even though the house’s occupant has the exclusive right of occupancy.
Both legal traditions strongly identify ownership with possession. However, Anglo-American law allows the right of possession to be divided temporally, so that one person may have the right to possess during that person’s life while another person holds the right to possess thereafter (see below Temporal divisions). In contrast, civil-law systems rarely allow the right of possession to be so divided in terms of time. In the preceding example, civil law is more likely to determine that the person who holds the right to possess during his life has a “usufructuary” (right-to-use) interest only—not ownership.
Because Western systems connect ownership with the right to possess, it is possible that the ownership of property will shift when the right to possession and possession in fact are separated for a long time. Under a body of law known as “adverse possession,” if person A vacates a tract of land that he owns, and person B behaves as the real owner would, person B may enter into possession of it. That second possession is wrongful as to person A, but person A must act to recover his possession from person B within the period set down in the statute of limitations. In most Anglo-American jurisdictions the statute of limitations on actions to recover land is quite long, 10 or 20 years. But if person A fails to act within the limitations period, his action will be barred.
One may ask who then owns the land. In most Anglo-American jurisdictions the peaceable possessor of land has the right to possess that land against all except those who can show a better right to possession. But if person A’s right to possession is barred by the statute of limitations, then his claim is not better than that of the peaceable possessor. Thus, the person who has actual possession of land for the limitations period acquires a right to possession good as against the whole world, including the true owner whose claim is now time-barred. This adverse possessor, then, becomes the true owner by passage of time.
In the civil-law countries the vocabulary is different, but the results are similar. With the passage of time (somewhat longer than in the Anglo-American systems), the possessor is said to acquire title by a process known as prescription.
Divisions of ownership
All Western legal systems allow the owner of property to divide it along spatial lines. Such divisions may be unwise, for example, where the resulting piece of land has no access to a public right-of-way (see below Public regulation of land use). In the case of land, public regulation may prevent the division.
A somewhat different set of problems arises when the desired division is vertical rather than horizontal. By and large, Anglo-American law allows such vertical divisions, so that one person may own the mineral strata underneath land, another the surface of the land, and the third the air rights. The civil-law systems have had some difficulty with this type of division of ownership, because of the medieval maxim “Cuius est solum eius est usque ad coelum et usque ad inferos” (“Whoever owns the soil owns all the way to heaven and all the way to hell”). In both systems modern legislation has made possible, for example, ownership of an apartment on the 30th floor of a building. Condominium ownership is more complicated, because the condominium owner owns not only the area within the four walls of his apartment or house but also access rights and privileges to use common areas and utilities. Cooperative ownership avoids this complexity by having each of the cooperators own a share in a corporation. The corporation, in turn, allows the cooperators to possess their dwelling units, while retaining the title to all the property.
Anglo-American law is notorious for the number and complexity of temporal divisions of ownership it allows. The English law on the topic was considerably simplified in 1925, when it became impossible to have legal ownership divided temporally other than between landlord and tenant. English law, however, continues to allow complicated temporal divisions of beneficial interests in trusts, allowing, therefore, a temporal division in the equitable but not the legal ownership. In many of the remaining Anglo-American jurisdictions, temporal division of the legal ownership of land is still possible, although increasingly undertaken by way of trust.
Life estate and remainder
One of the possible temporal divisions of ownership in Anglo-American law, the life estate and the remainder in fee, has already been considered. In such an arrangement the life tenant has the right to possess the land for his natural life. He may use the property, but he may not impair its capital value (commit waste). He may convey his interest, but he may convey no more than what he has, an interest limited by his life. Hence, his conveyee receives an estate limited by the life of the conveyor (estate pur autre vie). Common-law dower and curtesy are types of life estates.
The remainderman has a right to possession that commences upon the death of the life tenant. He may not use the land until the life tenant dies but may sue the life tenant if the life tenant commits waste. Since the remainderman’s interest is an interest in fee, his interest will pass to his heirs or devisees if he dies before the life tenant. The remainderman may also convey his interest inter vivos, subject to the life estate. If the original owner in fee conveys a life estate to someone else and retains the rest of the property in himself, the retained interest is called a reversion. For most purposes reversions have the same characteristics as remainders. A number of variations on the basic pattern of life estate and remainder are possible in Anglo-American law. There may, for example, be successive life estates: “to my wife, Edith, for her life, remainder to my son George for his life, remainder after George’s death to George’s children.”
Not only is it possible to create successive interests in land in Anglo-American law, but it is also possible to create interests that are subject to express contingencies. Thus, in the example given above, the donor could make the remainder in George contingent upon George’s having attained a specific age, say 21, at the time of the death of the previous life tenant.
Not only is it possible to make future interests subject to contingencies, but it is also possible in most Anglo-American jurisdictions to make present interests in fee subject to contingencies. Thus, it is possible, for example, to grant a fee interest subject to the contingency that the land be used for school purposes and to provide for a forfeiture of the interest if it is not so used (fee simple determinable, fee simple subject to a condition subsequent).
Some, although not all, of the arrangements described above are possible in civil law. The major distinction between Anglo-American and civil law in this regard is that civil law normally does not regard such arrangements as involving divisions of ownership. Thus, the usufruct, the device in civil law that most closely corresponds to the life estate of the Anglo-American law, is regarded not as a form of ownership but as a right in the thing of another (jus in re aliena).
Although the usufructuary normally does not have the right to possession in civil law, he is normally given possessory remedies against third-party wrongdoers. All in all, one may question how different the practical position of the usufructuary is from that of the life tenant in Anglo-American law, despite the substantial conceptual differences between the two systems.
Even in the area of conditional gifts, the differences between the two systems are not as great as they might seem. True, in civil law the basic principle is that gifts cannot be conditioned. The donor must give outright or not at all. There are, however, exceptions in civil law that derive from the medieval Roman law of fideicommissary substitutions (the Roman fideicommission that permitted testators to avoid certain restrictions on legacies that existed under the formulary system of Roman law). The rules are complicated and vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. In the French system, for example, it is possible to make a will giving property to one’s children and requiring that they turn it over to their children. In German law, it is possible to appoint successive heirs, so long as the succession occurs within 30 years of the death of the testator.
There is no equivalent in the civil law of the fee simple with a forfeiture clause. Thus, a grant subject to the condition that the land be used for school purposes is not possible in civil law, although there are ways of achieving similar results in civil law, at least for limited periods of time.
In Anglo-American law present possessory interests less than the fee need not be limited to the life of the holder of the interest; they may also be limited to a specific term of years or to a renewable term. Such a transaction creates the relationship of landlord and tenant. The tenant may have a possessory interest for any specific term, such as 1 month, 1 year, 5 years, or 99 years. The tenant may also have an interest for a specific term that is renewed automatically unless the landlord or the tenant gives notice within a fixed period before the term expires (periodic tenancy). Thus, tenancies can be arranged, for example, from week to week, month to month, or year to year. It is also possible to have a tenancy for no fixed term but subject simply to the will of the landlord and tenant (tenancy at will). Either landlord or tenant may give notice to the other at any time to terminate the tenancy. (In many jurisdictions tenancies at will are subject to statutory regulation concerning the time of the notice to terminate, thus making them more like periodic tenancies.)
Similarly, civil law allows the creation of landlord-tenant relations. Although the categories of tenancies recognized in Anglo-American law do not exist in civil law, it is possible to create by private agreement most of the landlord-tenant arrangements that Anglo-American law recognizes. What is different in civil law is the conception of the relationship between landlord and tenant. In modern civil law, as in Roman law, the tenant does not have the right to possession; the landlord does. Since the landlord has a contractual obligation to allow the tenant to possess, the practical consequences of this conceptual distinction are not great. The most important area where the two systems differ is in the situation where the landlord sells his interest in the land to someone else. In Anglo-American law, the tenant has an enforceable possessory interest against his new landlord. In civil law, the tenant’s remedy is against his old landlord. Even this difference has been narrowed by recent legislation in civil-law jurisdictions that allows tenants to sue third parties who interfere with their possession in fact.
Throughout the West in the second half of the 20th century, there were substantial changes in the law governing landlord-tenant relationships. These changes most notably affected the law concerning residential tenancies, particularly tenancies in urban apartments. Some jurisdictions also made extensive changes in the law governing agricultural tenancies. By and large, the law of commercial tenancies was left to private agreement. Commercial leases, therefore, continue to use traditional forms, with the terms being negotiated between the parties.
In the United States the changes in residential landlord-tenant law were initiated by the courts. Legislation has followed, confirming and frequently going beyond what the courts have done. In the rest of the West, the initiative has been taken by the legislatures, although the end results have been quite similar.
In the United States changes in the law of landlord and tenant came in the 1960s and early ’70s, when the country came to focus on the deteriorated conditions of housing that existed for the urban poor, those who had been left behind as the middle class moved to newly constructed housing in the suburbs. Urban housing for the poor was frequently maintained at levels far below what was required by local regulation, but enforcement of these codes was sporadic. Faced with this situation and with considerable legislative inertia, American courts came to read the provisions of the housing code into the lease. Javins v. First Nat’l Realty Co. (1970), for example, requires that every residential lease have within it an unwaivable warranty of habitability, requiring the landlord to maintain the premises up to the standard of the local housing code. If the landlord does not maintain the premises up to this standard, the tenant may withhold rent, and the landlord cannot evict him for nonpayment of rent.
Legislation in the 1970s tended to confirm the results of Javins. Other legislation and decisions gave residential tenants more security of tenure. A number of urban jurisdictions that had abandoned rent control reinstated it. While there are still considerable differences between the American and European patterns of regulation of the residential landlord-tenant relationship, the trend is toward convergence. Everywhere the essential terms of the relationship are increasingly fixed by law; the tenant’s interest in his dwelling has become more secure, while the landlord is regarded less as an owner than as the provider of a public utility. Public sentiment has swung for and against rent control over the years.
Other forms of divided ownership: trusts, mortgages, and security interests
Anglo-American law recognizes another possible division of ownership, that between the power to manage property and the privilege of receiving the benefits from it. This division, known as the trust, is of great practical importance in Anglo-American law. The trust device is used in a wide variety of contexts, most notably in family settlements and in charitable gifts. In the area of family settlements it has largely replaced the legal life estate and remainder.
Fundamental to the notion of the trust is the division of ownership between legal and equitable. This division had its origins in separate English courts. The courts of common law recognized and enforced the legal ownership; the courts of equity recognized and enforced the equitable ownership. The conceptual division of the two types of ownership, however, survived the merger of the law and equity courts. Thus, today legal and equitable interests are usually enforced by the same courts, but they remain conceptually distinct.
The basic distinction between legal and equitable ownership is quite simple. The legal owner of the property (trustee) has the right to possession, the privilege of use, and the power to convey those rights and privileges. The trustee thus appears by all counts to be the owner of the property—or so it appears to all but one person, the beneficial owner (beneficiary, cestui que trust). As between the trustee and the beneficiary, the beneficiary gets all the benefits of the property. The trustee has a fiduciary duty to the beneficial owner to exercise his legal rights, privileges, and powers in such a way as to benefit not himself but the beneficiary. If the trustee fails to do this, the courts will require him to pay over what he has earned for himself to the beneficiary and may, in extreme cases, remove him as legal owner and substitute another in his stead.
Divisions between legal and beneficial ownership are normally created by an express instrument of trust. The maker (settlor) of the trust will convey property to the trustee (who may be an individual or a corporation, such as a bank or trust company) and instruct the trustee to hold and manage the property for the benefit of one or more beneficiaries of the trust.
Trust instruments can be quite complicated. They may provide for succession among the trustees and for succession among the beneficiaries. They may give the trustee considerable discretion in managing the property and in paying out the benefits to the beneficiaries. In nearly all jurisdictions the beneficiary’s interest may be insulated from the claims of his creditors, as in a spendthrift, or protective, trust. Some U.S. states have enacted statutes permitting individuals to create spendthrift trusts for themselves. These so-called “asset protection trusts” allow an owner to continue to receive all of the benefits of ownership while also immunizing the owner’s beneficial ownership interests (e.g., the right to receive all income from the trust assets for life) from his creditors.
The use of a trust (rather than the legal life-estate-remainder arrangement) effectively separates the management of assets from the enjoyment of them. By transferring assets into the hands of professional or semiprofessional managers, the trust arrangement frequently allows assets to be managed more competently than they would be by some or all of the beneficiaries. Further, the assets themselves are not locked into the arrangement. If it makes sense to sell a piece of land or to shift an investment portfolio from bonds to stocks, the trustee does this, and he can give good title to the assets. Further still, use of the trust allows the beneficial interest in property to pass from generation to generation without causing the property to pass through probate, an awkward and time-consuming process in many Anglo-American jurisdictions. Finally, use of the trust sometimes allows for a savings in taxes.
There is no precise equivalent of the trust in civil law. In Islamic law there is an institution, the waqf, that is somewhat like the Anglo-American trust. Some modern civil-law systems have created an institution like the trust, but this has normally been by adapting trust ideas from the Anglo-American system rather than by developing native ideas.
Most of the uses to which the Anglo-American trust is put are achieved in civil law in other ways. For example, the charitable trust of Anglo-American law has a quite close analogy in the civil-law foundation. Of the purposes for private express trusts mentioned above, lawyers on the Continent get professional management for assets by turning them over to managers who are paid a fee for their services. Since the number of possible outstanding interests in a given piece of property is more limited in the civil law than it is in Anglo-American, it is less necessary to have a trustee who can give good title to the whole of the property. Probate avoidance is rarely an issue on the Continent, because civil-law systems of probate are normally far less cumbersome than the Anglo-American systems. Thus, as in so many other areas in comparative Western law, it turns out that some of the needs that the Anglo-American trust serves are not needs in the civil-law systems because of structural differences between the systems; the remaining needs are served by other devices.
Security interests in property
Another division of the rights, privileges, and powers of ownership exists in all Western legal systems—the division that occurs when an owner makes use of his property as security for a loan or other obligation. In this area there is little practical difference between the Anglo-American and civil-law systems, despite great differences in vocabulary and conceptualization about property used in a secured transaction. Both systems recognize arrangements between debtor and creditor in which the ownership of the thing is nominally transferred to the creditor, but the creditor’s ability to deal with the thing is limited in such a way that the ownership will revert to the debtor so long as the debtor discharges his obligation. Both systems also recognize arrangements in which the creditor does not receive an ownership interest in the property but receives sufficient rights against the debtor so that he is secure if the debtor does not discharge his obligation.
In both systems the most complicated, and historically the most important, security devices have to do with land—the mortgage of the common law and the hypothec (pledge) of the civil law. In the mortgage of the common law, the debtor (mortgagor) conveyed his land to the creditor (mortgagee) subject to the condition that the land would automatically revert back to the debtor if the debtor discharged his obligation by a certain date. The debtor, however, remained in possession of the land, and the practice of allowing the debtor to remain in possession became an obligation of the creditor to allow the debtor to possess the land and finally a right in the debtor to possess the land so long as the debtor was not in default on the debt. If the debtor defaulted, the creditor’s right to possess became perfected, and he could enter and use the land for himself or sell it as he wished. The debtor’s interests were extinguished.
The equity courts intervened on the side of the debtor. Equity first gave the debtor a right to redeem the property by paying the amount that was owed, even if he had defaulted on the debt. In order to sell the property, creditors were forced to bring an action in equity to foreclose the debtor’s equity of redemption. As a condition of foreclosure, equity gave the debtor a right to the proceeds of the sale to the extent that the sale realized more than the outstanding debt. Legislation in the 19th century extended the debtor’s right to redeem even after the creditor had foreclosed. Finally, in some jurisdictions legislation required that the creditor sell the property after he had foreclosed, and in some of these jurisdictions the sale had to be conducted by a public official.
At common law the debtor could not transfer legal title to his property to third persons because he did not own it. (He could, however, convey his equity of redemption.) This meant that a purchaser in good faith might end up with nothing even though the mortgagor looked to all the world like the owner of the property (he was in possession and could normally produce evidence that the property had been transferred to him by a previous owner). In order to protect third-party purchasers, most Anglo-American jurisdictions have public offices in which mortgage transactions can be recorded or registered (see below Registration and recordation). At common law, or between successive grantees, priority in title was determined by the timing of the respective conveyances. If O granted land to A and later granted the same land to B, A prevails over B by virtue of being first in time. Today if A takes from O and fails to record the deed, and B later purchases the land from O without actual notice of the O-A deed, then B is protected against A.
The mortgagor’s interest looks more like that of an owner than do those of the creditor, despite the fact that the mortgage deed says that the creditor is the owner. Other jurisdictions retain the notion that the creditor is the owner subject to all the qualifications offered above. There is little practical difference in result in the two types of jurisdiction.
Although they originated from very different premises, the civil-law systems have arrived at much the same result. The debtor has the right to possession and privilege of use of the property unless and until he defaults. If he defaults, the creditor may, depending on the jurisdiction, either take possession of the property or force a sale of it. The debtor’s interest in the proceeds of the sale over and above the outstanding amount of the debt is everywhere protected. In some jurisdictions the debtor may also be given a grace period within which he can redeem the property after default. Registration of security interests is virtually universal. If the interest is registered, the creditor’s interest survives any transfer of the property, even to a good-faith purchaser without actual notice of the security interest.
Security interests in movables have a somewhat different history. In the Anglo-American system security interests in personal property were developed largely by the equity courts, aided in the 19th and 20th centuries by legislation. The result is a quite complex branch of what is normally called commercial law (see commercial transaction). Suffice it to say that it is possible to have arrangements much like a mortgage whereby the debtor retains possession of the property subject to a security interest in the creditor (chattel mortgage or conditional sale) or to have the creditor take possession of the property subject to the debtor’s right to redeem it by paying the debt (pledge or pawn). In some jurisdictions, notably England, the debtor will lease the property from the creditor (who is also normally the seller), his title becoming absolute when the payments have been made (hire purchase). In the United States the differences between the various types of personal property security agreements have been considerably reduced by uniform legislation that deals with all of them under one heading. (See also installment credit.)
On the Continent the pledge or pawn (pignus) was historically the chief security device for movables. Under this device the right to possession of the movable was in the creditor, although possession in fact might not be. Financing devices for merchants are handled in separate codes of commercial law, where the devices tend to be similar to those of the Anglo-American chattel mortgage or conditional sale. Modern consumer-credit law has produced a number of devices, some of them representing developments from the civil law of pledge, some more closely resembling the English hire purchase.
Protection of property interests
Public law protections of property
If person A takes the property of person B without his permission and with the intent to deprive him of it permanently, that is theft, a concept that is virtually universal. Modern Anglo-American criminal codes tend to subdivide theft in ways that reflect their common-law background. Larceny is the simple taking of personal property or money from the possession of another with the intent to deprive the possessor of it permanently. Burglary is larceny aggravated by the fact that it is achieved by breaking and entering premises in order to accomplish it. Robbery is larceny aggravated by the fact that it is achieved by the exercise of force or threats of force against the possessor. Embezzlement is a wrongful taking of property by someone (such as a bank clerk) who is already rightfully in possession of it.
The civil-law criminal codes do not observe the Anglo-American distinction between larceny and embezzlement. Otherwise, the criminal prosecution of theft in civil law is quite similar to that in the Anglo-American systems. An intent to deprive (animus furandi) is required. The penalty will vary depending on the value of the thing stolen and will be aggravated if the theft is accompanied by wrongfully entering premises or by the exercise of force.
Land cannot be stolen in either Anglo-American or civil law. Wrongful entry onto land may be punished in Anglo-American law by statutes regulating criminal trespass. Deliberate damage to another’s land may also be punished criminally, particularly under modern regulatory statutes concerning the environment.
An extensive body of regulatory law concerning the use of property, particularly of land, was developed in the 20th century. The effect of such regulatory law is to protect the property interests of those members of the community whose property would be adversely affected by the land use proscribed by the regulation. Thus, if an environmental law prohibits the emission of certain pollutants from a smokestack or an automobile, that law protects the interests of those on whose land the pollutants would otherwise descend or those who would otherwise breathe the polluted air.
In some circumstances some Western jurisdictions allow those adversely affected by the violation of such regulations to sue the violators directly. In other circumstances and in other jurisdictions such standing to sue is not allowed, but the adversely affected individual may bring an administrative proceeding to compel enforcement of these regulations. Even if no private enforcement is allowed, the facts that the regulation exists and that its enforcement by public authorities can normally be expected changes the property interests, in the definitional sense, not only of the property owner whose privilege of use is limited by the regulation but also of those who benefit from the regulation.
Private law protections of property
The protection of property in civil procedure has a long history in both the Anglo-American and the civil-law systems. Both procedures are strongly affected by the fundamental distinction that Roman law made between actions in personam and those in rem and by the distinction that the medieval civilians (lawyers in the civil law system) made between actions to establish ownership (petitory actions) and those to recover possession (possessory actions).
In the Anglo-American systems the basic action for vindication of an ownership interest in land is usually a modern action derived from the common-law action of ejectment. This action results in the successful plaintiff’s being restored to the physical possession of the land. After some controversy, still not completely settled by the end of the 20th century, it was decided that the plaintiff in ejectment need not prove title good as against the whole world but simply a relatively better right to possession than the defendant. The operations of this action thus fit into the Anglo-American concept of ownership as a relatively better right to possession.
For the owner seeking a judicial declaration of his title to land, most of the Anglo-American systems provide an action derived from the equity action to quiet title (a quiet-title action attempts to secure the plaintiff’s title to the land by forcing the opposing claimant either to prove his claim or to drop the claim entirely). This results in a declaratory judgment as to the state of the title. The procedural difficulties of bringing this action make it distinctly less desirable than ejectment, but sometimes it is the only remedy available (where, for example, the plaintiff is already in possession but the defendant claims ownership or some lesser interest and hence is hampering the market value of the plaintiff’s land). As a general matter, where the action of ejectment is not available, equity courts, or their modern descendants, will protect the plaintiff who has established that he has a property interest in the land by issuing an injunction against the defendant who is interfering with the interest.
Because the action of ejectment tries the better right to possession, separate possessory actions for land are no longer a main feature of Anglo-American law. Most jurisdictions do, however, have a statutory possessory action, derived from the English statutes of forcible entry and detainer, in which an owner or prior peaceable possessor can recover possession from one who has taken or who detains possession without pretense of right. These actions are frequently used by landlords to recover possession from tenants who have held over after the terms of their leases have expired and are occasionally used by peaceable possessors who have been ousted from their possession by force.
Possession of land is also protected in the Anglo-American system by civil actions of trespass. Technically, trespass is a personal action, and the successful plaintiff recovers only money damages. Since such actions frequently rest on the right to possession, however, they were used in the past, and in some jurisdictions are used today, to try title.
Historically, the Anglo-American system had no real action to vindicate ownership of movables. Although still technically personal actions, actions concerning movable property have been expanded in Anglo-American law, so that today they serve most of the purposes of the old real actions of the land law. In England, conversion, a descendant of the common-law trover action, is used, coupled with the possibility that in some situations (normally in the case of unique movables) the court may specifically decree the restoration of the thing itself. In the United States the common-law action of replevin was changed to allow the same purpose to be achieved.
Modern civil-law systems retain the distinction that Roman law made between petitory and possessory actions, but the tendency in both cases is toward a procedure of relative rather than absolute rights. Thus, for example, the modern French revendication (a means of recovering property through a formal claim), while still nominally an action that tries absolute ownership, has in practice become an action that tries relatively better title between the plaintiff and the defendant. Similarly, the French possessory actions of réintégrande and complainte are available to almost any peaceable possessor as a means of recovering something of which he was dispossessed by someone whose claim to possession is inferior to his. The results in the German system are similar, although the German scheme of actions is somewhat closer to that of Roman law. German law also knows an action to correct the Grundbuch, which has a somewhat similar function to that of the Anglo-American quiet title action (see below Registration and recordation).