Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

My interpretation - the UK was about having a few gentry owning all the land and a lot of peasants that just work on the land. The US was about giving each settler a Homestead of previously unowned land (Natives not being considered capable of owning land, because racism). So, a registry would be easy to operate in the UK, but the US was too big and poorly connected and had too many land owners to make that viable.

One example is Ayn Rand who said that Natives weren't using land productively and therefore weren't really owners of it.




Torrens title was invented in South Australia in the mid 19th century. It is named for the Australian politician Sir Robert Torrens, who was briefly Premier of the Colony of South Australia around the same time. It has since spread around the world, including a few American states, but has not seen anywhere near as much adoption in the US as in many other parts of the English-speaking world.

Now, the contemporary English system isn’t strictly speaking Torrens, it actually is somewhat of a hybrid between a pure Torrens system (as used in Australia and many other places), and the original English system (which slowly evolved out of mediaeval English law) and which is still mostly retained in the US. But still, to the extent that the records of the Land Registry take priority over the actual title documents, it is closer to the Torrens system than most US systems.

I think the main reasons for the lesser adoption of Torrens in the US have little to do with the reasons you suggest. Trying to link the US non-adoption of it to the dispossession of indigenous people is dubious given that Australia, where it was invented, has a similar history. It is basically due to the greater number and greater conservatism of US state jurisdictions (here I mean “conservatism” primarily in the “slow-to-embrace-change” sense, rather than conservatism as a political ideology, this is the kind of technocratic legal issue about which neither progressives nor conservatives, in the ideological sense, care much), and also due to the lobbying power of the US title services/insurance industry, which sees the greater simplicity of the Torrens system (most of the time, ignoring occasional problems and frauds like this, which can and have happened under pre-Torrens systems too) as a threat to their established business models

Torrens essentially tries to optimise for the most common case, in which title is clear and no fraud is going on, and make that common case as simple and cheap as possible, even if by doing so the outcome in those rare cases of disputes and frauds may not always be completely optimal




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: