It is not often that an expert committee, asked to report on a technical problem, have to admit defeat. But the Lord Chancellor's Committee on Land Charges, in their recent Report, confess that to rectify the 1925 machinery of registration, now that it is more than thirty years old, is a task beyond the wit of man. When so eminent a committee as that which sat under Mr. Justice Roxburgh reach such a conclusion, one may be sure that the law has thrown up an exceptionally tough conundrum. And it is of general interest that such things can happen. If the inventions of one generation of legislators fail to justify themselves, the next generation should be able to amend them, at any rate where the difficulties are purely technical and there are no questions of policy. But Lord Birkenhead and Sir Benjamin Cherry appear to have succeeded in creating the conveyancing equivalent of a Franckenstein's monster, which with the passing years would become not only more dangerous but also more difficult to kill.

The Report nevertheless contains plenty of valuable suggestions. In the first thirty years of the new system of registration many defects have come to light, and the Committee have attacked a number of familiar conveyancing problems. Of outstanding interest are their conclusions that registration of restrictive covenants should be discontinued, that the so-called rule in Re Forsey and Hollebone's Contract should be abolished, and (more tentatively) that the reversal of the rule in Patman v. Harland by section 44 (5) of the Law of Property Act, 1925, was a mistake.

The literature on possessio has now assumed such proportions that it will require a volume at least to do anything like justice to it. The purpose of this article is only to outline an approach to the Roman law of possessio as suggested by Kocourek's analysis of possession in the common law. The present writer believes that a substantial similarity exists between these two great systems in their approach to possession and this has not been due to any borrowing by the one from the other: a fact which, if proved, should be of no little jurisprudential interest. It is, therefore, merely as a prologue to a fuller exposition elsewhere that the following contentions are advanced as to possessio in Roman law.

Kocourek, writing of the common law, maintained that “possession” as a juridical concept distinct from physical control on the one hand and the right to have physical control on the other was unnecessary. If a person actually holds a thing, he either has a right to continue holding it or he has no right; if he is not holding a thing, he either has or has not a right to hold it. In all cases what matters is the right to have physical control. As long as the term “possession” is confined to physical control, no harm is done, but what Kocourek objects to is that mysterious tertium quid, called “possession,” from which are distinguished both physical control and the right to it, the former being known variously as “de facto possession,” “custody,” “detention,” and the latter as the “right to possess.”