Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 9.djvu/376

348 348 HARVARD LAW REVIEW, of the present state of affairs, when these volumes are to be counted by tens of thousands, and this vast number is being yearly augmented ? It is a full recognition of the evil of this multiplicity of reports that has led the Amer- ican Bar Association to constitute a permanent " Committee on Law Report- ing and Digesting." Systematic efforts are henceforth to be made by the Committee toward preventing the duplication of State and Federal reports, and toward securing, too, more uniformity among reporters in the con- struction of both the index and the case syllabus. The Committee, as stated in their report submitted at the meeting of the Bar Association held at Detroit last August, sent a circular letter to the various official court report- ers, — sixty-five in all. The answers, besides furnishing valuable data as to the defects in the present varying systems of reporting, reveal a nearly unani- mous desire on the part of the writers for a convention of official reporters. In such a convention under the auspices of the Committee, there is a strong likelihood of inaugurating far-reaching and uniform remedial measures. The Torrens Land Transfer System on Trial. — At the recent election in Cook County, Illinois, it was voted to adopt the provisions of the Land Transfer Act passed by the last legislature. This brings the city of Chicago within the operation of the act. Although several States have at different times appointed commissioners to investigate the so-called " Tor- rens " land transfer system, that is, a system of transfer of land by record of title, it is now for the first time to be given a trial in this country. The merits and demerits of the system have been pretty well threshed out, and the consensus of opinion is strongly in its favor as an original question. As a powerful plea, however, against introducing it, it is urged that the condi- tions that have secured its success in a new country like Australia are lack- ing here ; chiefly because the land, in our older States at least, is not under government ownership, which would permit the government to inaugurate without inconvenience such a system of transfer, but is parcelled out among a multitude of private landholders ; and it is repugnant to them, long accus- tomed to our system of deed registration, to risk their land tides by a radical change in the methods of transfer. A demonstration, however, by actual test, that the transfer by record of title is capable of successfully supplanting our present methods will go a long way toward answering these conservative objections. 'I'he success of the Illinois experiment therefore probably insures like action in other States. In this lies its importance. The act, while modelled upon the Torrens system as it exists in Australia, differs in one important respect. The first registration does not give absolute title ; it confers possessory title merely ; but as a result of a short period of limitation provided for in the same act, this possessory title becomes abso- lute, in the absence of adverse claims filed in the mean time, at the end of five years. Thus, by a little postponement of the time when the full benefit of the act is to be realized, the title is made absolute in a manner already familiar in this country ; and there is no danger that the true owner's title may be summarily divested. As a result, too, the expense of an exhaustive examination of title, which necessarily precedes any registration conferring absolute tide, is avoided. The act has the merit also of excluding unnecessary detail. It leaves to the administrative officers the main burden of working out the details for carrying its provisions into effect. It was the heaping of detail on detail