Registration

538Property Law

dependent on fishing. As it happened, this attempt to use registration to defend the British quota failed. The European Court of Justice held that the registration conditions were contrary to EC law, and the House of Lords ordered the British government to pay compensation to the shipowners who had been unable to re-register (see further R. v. Secretary of State for Transport, ex parte Factortame Ltd (No. 5) [2001] 1 AC 524). Nevertheless, ship registration (both in this country and abroad) continues to serve as a mechanism for the international regulation of safety standards and the welfare of crew. International conventions oblige all countries bound by them to impose regulatory regimes on all ships registered in that country, and entry to a port in any particular country may depend on the ship being registered in a country which imposes such regimes and enforces them to an acceptable degree.

Ship registration is also of course intended to facilitate the buying, selling and mortgaging of ships, but unlike land registration (and for obvious reasons) it operates on an international as well as a national level in this respect. In particular, the main function internationally of registration in national shipping registers is to act as an internationally recognised ‘badge’ of entitlement, which enables foreign courts to assume that the person registered as owner or mortgagee of a ship in the national register on which the ship is registered is indeed entitled under domestic law, without having to enquire into the property rules applicable in that particular jurisdiction. One consequence of this is that unregistered interests are not internationally recognised, a severe disadvantage given that ships tend to sail between jurisdictions. So, for example, English law recognises equitable property interests in British ships and they are fully enforceable in English courts but they are not enforceable in any other jurisdiction because they are not registrable under the British Merchant Shipping Act 1995, the current ship registration statute.

As far as land registration is concerned, our registration of title system differs from most European systems in that the first attempts at a national system were not made until the mid-nineteenth century, when the idea of land as a tradable commodity first started to emerge. The overriding consideration then was (as it was when the present system was introduced by the Land Registration Act in 1925, and as it still was when the 1925 Act was amended and replaced by the Land Registration Act 2002) to make conveyancing simpler and cheaper – in other words, to increase the marketability of land.

This is in marked contrast to the way in which most other European land registration systems evolved. In many European jurisdictions the impetus for cataloguing land came from the state, and the motive was to protect the interests of the state by gathering information to enable the state to levy tax. This was the origin of the cadastre, a systematic record of land-holdings sometimes said to have been devised in the Austrian Empire in the eighteenth century (see, for example, the short history given in Ruoff and Roper on the Law and Practice of Registered Conveyancing, Extract 15.1 below) but probably dating back much earlier than that (the Domesday book is an early English example). The cadastre forms the basis of