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pealed the Statute of Uses, the Statute of Distribution, and 
the Statute for Partition. But because of the lack of registry 
of legal and equitable titles the Acts made the legal estate 
of paramount importance for the sake of the purchaser. The 
Acts of 1925 simplified tenures ; reduced estates to fee simples 
and estates for years, and abolished tenancies in common; 
kept most equities off the title; denied a fee to mortgagees; 
provided that settlements must be by way of trusts; and as- 
similated the devolution of real and personal property. 
Many, including T. Cyprian Williams and Sir Arthur 
Underhill, desired to push the reforms further, and probably 
within a few years they will be pushed further. The legal 
profession in England agrees that the classic law of estates 
has outlived its usefulness, and the leaders believe that the 
law of property for the future must come out of the law of 
personal property. Real property must be assimilated to 
personal property. But how? One suggestion is to assimilate 
land to the chattel real. A compulsory registration of title 
(or perhaps of deeds) will also probably come in England 
within a short time after the ten years of inaction guar- 
anteed. 44 
Many of the problems which have been bothering the 
English do not bother the people of the United States. Land 
in the United States has always either been owned allodially 
or held under free and common socage tenure, so that we are 
not bothered by family land settlements. We do not find so 
much difficulty in assimilating real to personal property be- 
cause we have assimilated personal property to real property. 
We have long had complete systems of registration. In the 
United States the law of waters has practically become the 
golden rule. Yet our real property law is not perfect. For 
the future we have the same problems which the English have, 
and shall probably solve them as the English will by obtaining 
a law of property out of the law of personal property. 
Contracts. The development in the law of contracts in this 
period has been in connection with the topic of illegality, thru 
which means many things have been removed from the realm 
of contracts in order to protect other social interests. Illustra- 
tions of these things are agreements in restraint of trade, 
agreements to create a monopoly, agreements to relieve a com- 
44 Bordwell, “Property Reform in England”, 11 Iowa L. Rev. 1. 
