A trust is a legal relationship in which the owner of property, or any transferable right, gives it to another to manage and use solely for the benefit of a designated person. In the English common law, the party who entrusts the property is known as the "settlor", the party to whom it is entrusted is known as the "trustee", the party for whose benefit the property is entrusted is known as the "beneficiary", and the entrusted property is known as the "corpus" or "trust property". A testamentary trust is an irrevocable trust established and funded pursuant to the terms of a deceased person's will. An inter vivos trust is a trust created during the settlor's life.
Escheat is a common law doctrine that transfers the real property of a person who has died without heirs to the crown or state. It serves to ensure that property is not left in "limbo" without recognized ownership. It originally applied to a number of situations where a legal interest in land was destroyed by operation of law, so that the ownership of the land reverted to the immediately superior feudal lord.
In property law, title is an intangible construct representing a bundle of rights in (to) a piece of property in which a party may own either a legal interest or equitable interest. The rights in the bundle may be separated and held by different parties. It may also refer to a formal document, such as a deed, that serves as evidence of ownership. Conveyance of the document may be required in order to transfer ownership in the property to another person. Title is distinct from possession, a right that often accompanies ownership but is not necessarily sufficient to prove it. In many cases, possession and title may each be transferred independently of the other. For real property, land registration and recording provide public notice of ownership information.
In English law, a fee simple or fee simple absolute is an estate in land, a form of freehold ownership. A "fee" is a vested, inheritable, present possessory interest in land. A "fee simple" is real property held without limit of time under common law, whereas the highest possible form of ownership is a "fee simple absolute", which is without limitations on the land's use.
In English common law, fee tail or entail, is a form of trust, established by deed or settlement, that restricts the sale or inheritance of an estate in real property and prevents that property from being sold, devised by will, or otherwise alienated by the tenant-in-possession, and instead causes it to pass automatically, by operation of law, to an heir determined by the settlement deed. The terms fee tail and tailzie are from Medieval Latin feodum talliatum, which means "cut(-short) fee". Fee tail deeds are in contrast to "fee simple" deeds, possessors of which have an unrestricted title to the property, and are empowered to bequeath or dispose of it as they wish. Equivalent legal concepts exist or formerly existed in many other European countries and elsewhere; in Scots law tailzie was codified in the Entail Act 1685.
In common law and statutory law, a life estate is the ownership of immovable property for the duration of a person's life. In legal terms, it is an estate in real property that ends at death, when the property rights may revert to the original owner or to another person. The owner of a life estate is called a "life tenant". The person who will take over the rights upon death is said to have a "remainder" interest and is known as a "remainderman".
This aims to be a complete list of the articles on real estate.
An estate in land is, in the law of England and Wales, an interest in real property that is or may become possessory. It is a type of personal property and encompasses land ownership, rental and other arrangements that give people the right to use land. This is distinct from sovereignty over the land, which includes the right to government and taxation.
In common law jurisdictions, probate is the judicial process whereby a will is "proved" in a court of law and accepted as a valid public document that is the true last testament of the deceased; or whereby, in the absence of a legal will, the estate is settled according to the laws of intestacy that apply in the state where the deceased resided at the time of their death.
Estate planning is the process of anticipating and arranging for the management and disposal of a person's estate during the person's life in preparation for future incapacity or death. The planning includes the bequest of assets to heirs, loved ones, and/or charity, and may include minimizing gift, estate, and generation-skipping transfer taxes. Estate planning includes planning for incapacity, reducing or eliminating uncertainties over the administration of a probate, and maximizing the value of the estate by reducing taxes and other expenses. The ultimate goal of estate planning can only be determined by the specific goals of the estate owner, and may be as simple or complex as the owner's wishes and needs directs. Guardians are often designated for minor children and beneficiaries with incapacity.
In the United States, bankruptcy is largely governed by federal law, commonly referred to as the "Bankruptcy Code" ("Code"). The United States Constitution authorizes Congress to enact "uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States". Congress has exercised this authority several times since 1801, including through adoption of the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978, as amended, codified in Title 11 of the United States Code and the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA).
Use, as a term in the property law of common law countries, amounts to a recognition of the duty of a person to whom property has been conveyed for certain purposes, to carry out those purposes. In this context "use" is equivalent to "benefit".
In the common law of England, the doctrine of worthier title was a legal doctrine that preferred taking title to real estate by descent over taking title by devise or by purchase. It essentially provides that a remainder cannot be created in the grantor's heirs, at least not by those words.
In the law of inheritance, wills and trusts, a disclaimer of interest is an attempt by a person to renounce their legal right to benefit from an inheritance or through a trust. "If a trustee disclaims an interest in property that otherwise would have become trust property, the interest does not become trust property."
In finance, a security interest is a legal right granted by a debtor to a creditor over the debtor's property which enables the creditor to have recourse to the property if the debtor defaults in making payment or otherwise performing the secured obligations. One of the most common examples of a security interest is a mortgage: a person borrows money from the bank to buy a house, and they grant a mortgage over the house so that if they default in repaying the loan, the bank can sell the house and apply the proceeds to the outstanding loan.
Cestui que is a shortened version of "cestui a que use le feoffment fuit fait", lit. 'the person for whose use/benefit the feoffment was made'; in modern terms, it corresponds to a beneficiary. It is a Law French phrase of medieval English invention, which appears in the legal phrases cestui que trust, cestui que use, or cestui que vie. In contemporary English the phrase is also commonly pronounced SET-ee-kay or SEST-ee-kay. According to Roebuck, Cestui que use is pronounced SET-ik-ee-YOOSS. Cestui que use and cestui que trust are often interchangeable. In some medieval documents it is seen as cestui a que. In formal legal discourse it is often used to refer to the relative novelty of a trust itself, before that English term became acceptable.
A common recovery was a legal proceeding in England that enabled lawyers to convert an entailed estate into absolute ownership, fee simple. This was accomplished through the use of a series of collusive legal procedures, some parts of which were fictional and others unenforceable. It was devised and perfected by lawyers in the second half of the fifteenth century. A 1472 case, known as Taltarum's Case, increased its popularity.
A freehold, in common law jurisdictions such as England and Wales, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and twenty states in the United States, is the common mode of ownership of real property, or land, and all immovable structures attached to such land.
A deed of trust refers to a type of legal instrument which is used to create a security interest in real property and real estate. In a deed of trust, a person who wishes to borrow money conveys legal title in real property to a trustee, who holds the property as security for a loan (debt) from the lender to the borrower. The equitable title remains with the borrower. The borrower is referred to as the trustor, while the lender is referred to as the beneficiary.
The Rule in Shelley's Case is a rule of law that may apply to certain future interests in real property and trusts created in common law jurisdictions. It was applied as early as 1366 in The Provost of Beverly's Case but in its present form is derived from Shelley's Case (1581), in which counsel stated the rule as follows:
when the ancestor by any gift or conveyance takes an estate of freehold, and in the same gift or conveyance an estate is limited either mediately or immediately to his heirs in fee simple or in fee tail; that always in such cases, "the heirs" are words of limitation of the estate, not words of purchase.
