The keynote policy of the act was to reduce the number of legal estates to two – freehold and leasehold – and generally to make the transfer of interests in land easier for purchasers. Other policies were to regulate mortgages and as to leases, to regulate mainly their assignment, and to tackle some of the lacunae, ambiguities and shortcomings in the law of property. Innovations included the default creation of easements under section 62 to reduce unintended denial of access, and statutory enlargement under section 153. The Act followed a series of land law and policy reforms that had been begun by the Liberal government starting in 1906. This is how one American legal scholar, Morris Raphael Cohen, described it:
Provisions
Part I – General principles as to legal estates, equitable interests and powers
Part II – Contracts, conveyances and other instruments
Section 70 of the 1925 Act should be considered in conjunction with schedules 1 and 3 when considering interests that override, most notably that to be in receipts of rents and profits is no longer an overriding interest. Section 84 of the Act sets out the powers of an appointed authority to alter or remove restrictive covenants on property deeds. This power was later transferred to the Lands Tribunal by the Law of Property Act 1969, and subsequently to the Upper Tribunal by the Transfer of Tribunal Functions Order 2009.
Part III – Mortgages, rentcharges, and powers of attorney
s.173 Every voluntary disposition of land made with intent to defraud a later buyer is voidable at the instance of that buyer. And no such disposition shall be deemed to have been made with intent to defraud by reason only that a subsequent conveyance for valuable consideration was made, if such subsequent conveyance was made after 28 June 1893.
s.174 No acquisition made in good faith, without fraud or unfair dealing, of any reversionary interest in real or personal property, for money or money's worth, shall be liable to be opened or set aside merely on the ground of under value. In this subsection "reversionary interest" includes an expectancy or possibility. This expressly does not affect the jurisdiction of the court to set aside or modify unconscionable bargains.
Part X – Wills and probate
Part XI – Miscellaneous
Section 184 states that in cases of simultaneous death, the deaths will be assumed to have occurred in order of age, oldest first.
