Statutes
| Date | 01 January 1940 |
| Published date | 01 January 1940 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1939.tb00761.x |
216
MODERN LAW REVIEW
Jan.,
1940
STATUTES
Land
Law
and
the
Emergency
Legislation
It
is
not perhaps surprising that with the exception of the Rent Restric-
tions Acts the emergency legislation of
1914-18
had no direct effect
upon the growth of land law. War damage was insignificant and called
for no specific change in the law. Requisitioning raised interesting points
of constitutional law, but left untouched the general law of land. Very
little of the legislation itself
was
directly concerned with land. The Courts
(Emergency Powers) Act,
1914,
besides containing the germs of the Rent
Acts, merely created a moratorium
in
those cases where
a
tenant or mortgagee
was unable to pay his debts because of the war, and when this excuse
disappeared the Act itself disappeared. The Amendment Act of
1916
contained a useful clause, worthy of consideration to-day, enabling
members of the armed forces
to
determine their leases. Another amend-
ment act of the same year allowed the
Court
to suspend the operation of the
Prescription Act when, by reason of circumstances attributable to the war,
a
servient owner was unable to build
so
as to prevent the acquisition of an
easement of light. That was all.
From the point of view of land law, the major consequences of the war
were not direct, but indirect. They emerged from the social upheavals of
the war and post-war periods. Many of them have not yet reached
maturity
;
many, we may be sure, have not yet appeared in the long robe of
law. Housing And its problems have made the local authorities some of our
biggest landlords, with the attendant but difficult duty of becoming model
landlords; and,
if
legal evolution has any meaning, the standard which
they set may well become the standard imposed by law on others.
Slum
clearance, overcrowding, town and country planning, each of them related
to the essential problem
of
housing, have all emphasised, perhaps for the
first
time in English land law, the fact that property has duties as well
as rights. All these things we owe
to
the acceleration of legal growth which
was begun in
1914.
But they are all indirect consequences of that emergency. None of them,
I
think, could have been prophesied in
1914.
and
it
would be rash to begin
guessing in
1939.
That the future emphasis will be on the duties, instead
of the rights, of property, is an easy generalisation. Beyond
it
we step
into the darkness of time. The new Rent Act, however,
is
surely a portent.
The original Act of
1915
was purely an emergency measure, intended like
all
its
successors to be temporary
;
yet its policy outlived the
I925
revolution
in the law of real property, and to-day
it
is
still with
us,
shorn of the
obscurities of decontrol and enormously expanded in scope. Here, surely,
is something which
will
outlive the present war. And
it
is
a something of
importance, not oiily to the practitioner but to the legal scientist, for it
indicates unmistakeably that the law of landlord and tenant
is
changing
rapidly from the sphere of contract to that of status. Other post-war
Acts point the same way; the Housing Acts, the Landlord and Tenant
Act
of
1927,
the Leasehold Property (Repairs) Act, the Agricultural
Holdings Acts, all superimpose inescapable terms, all emphasise the
status at the expense of the contract. But
it
was the Rent Acts which
first made
it
possible, even inevitable, to recognise the change for what
it
is.
Already in
1919,
Parliament was driven to set out the terms of the new
“statutory tenancy.” To-day, those terms, varied only by the different
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