NORTH CAROLINA LAW REVIEW Volume 44 | Number 1 Article 10 12-1-1965 The Quest for Clear Land Titles -- Making Land Title Searches Shorter and Surer in North Carolina via Marketable Title Legislation James A. Webster Jr. Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/nclr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation James A. Webster Jr., The Quest for Clear Land Titles -- Making Land Title Searches Shorter and Surer in North Carolina via Marketable Title Legislation, 44 N.C. L. Rev. 89 (1965). Available at: http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/nclr/vol44/iss1/10 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Carolina Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in North Carolina Law Review by an authorized editor of Carolina Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. THE QUEST FOR CLEAR LAND TITLES- MAKING LAND TITLE SEARCHES SHORTER AND SURER IN NORTH CAROLINA VIA MARKETABLE TITLE LEGISLATION* By JAmES A. WEBSTER, JR.t There are voices crying in the wilderness of real property law that there is a "crisis in conveyancing."1 In a jet age that utilizes "hot lines" in the hope of averting a nuclear "hot war," perhaps the word "crisis" as related to land transactions is a bit overdramatic. But one need only to broach the subject of land-title searches to discover that non-ivory tower lawyers of current vintage are disillusioned with the adequacy of currently existing procedures for searching and certifying land titles. In the quietude of their offices, while they are resting in easy chairs away from the heavy, often dusty, giant grantor-grantee indexes and the other bundlesome volumes necessary to be lifted and opened in doing a thorough and painstaking title search, law- yers will admit that problems so often written about by law pro- fessors concerning real property are not merely hobgoblins of their own imaginations but are real.2 Title lawyers will admit that they * This article is the second of a projected series of articles on the im- provement of land law.