The Land Registration Act 2002 – The Show on the Road

Abstract

This article reviews the Land Registration Act 2002, taking advantage of the deeper perspective afforded by the intervening decade, and absorbing subsequent developments – and, in the case of the Act's electronic conveyancing project, non‐developments – that have also come to contribute to the picture. It suggests especially that while the Act's central idea of conclusive, indeed ‘constitutive’, registration can be beneficial, its deployment here has been problematic. In particular, the lapse of electronic conveyancing, and the possibility (resisted by the courts) that conclusive registration can be procured by fraudsters, have diminished the control that parties have over dispositions of their own title, to the detriment of their autonomy; and over‐preoccupation with the central idea has resulted in a failure to think carefully enough about problems to which it was never going to be the answer.