Nick Knapman considers an appeal court decision on acquiring registered land by adverse possession
"Can a man who has got his name registered as the proprietor of a parcel of registered land by wrongly claiming that he had been in adverse possession for 10 years hang on to that title, if the original proprietor, within 65 days of its being posted to him, failed to fill up and return a form posted to him by the Land Registry? Or can the original proprietor apply to the Registrar to have the register of title rectified by ‘correcting a mistake’? Does the machinery of the Land Registration Act 2002 allow a party to take someone else's land by operation of a bureaucratic machinery which trumps reality?"
So asked Jacob LJ in the introduction to his leading judgment in the recent Court of Appeal decision in Baxter v Mannion [2011 EWCA CIV 120, [2011] All ER (D) 235 (Feb)] concerning “an important question of principle” regarding the new system introduced by the Land Registration Act 2002 for acquiring registered
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