Deed Recordation, Title Registration, and Rights to Land: Conveyancing Innovation in Colonial Massachusetts and South Australia

Abstract

Public proclamation of land rights, through recordation of deeds in a local courthouse or by registration of title with a state land office—the Torrens system—were innovations of two settler societies sharing some common features. Both seventeenth-century Massachusetts, which introduced the recordation innovation, and nineteenth-century South Australia, where the Torrens system started, were promised empty land for ordered settlement, but the land turned out to belong to indigenous people. Uncertain over both their rights to that land and whether the traditional land rights notions they had known in England would apply in their new homes, settlers opted to make the status of land a public record, rather than the private ones that had intermediated land rights transactions in the old country. Both systems spread widely, and both helped refine and narrow concepts of which rights to land ought to prevail in much of the world.