The Alberta Law Reports Volume 11

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 edition. Excerpt: ...even though that debt might be due as the purchase price of land, a new way of giving notice of the assignment to the debtor. The plaintiff's interest was primarily in the debt, not in the land. The vendor has in my opinion no right to convey the legal estate in the land to him. That would be a breach of his contract with the purchaser. No doubt by the assignment the vendor did grant and transfer to the plaintiff all his interest in the land. But that interest was the right to hold the title until he was paid. Inasmuch however, as the vendor had no right to transfer the title to the plaintiff it is difficult to see what right in the land was really transferred to the plaintifi'. VV as it the vendor's lien for unpaid purchase money? Perhaps it was, though I find some difficulty in understanding why we should speak of a vendor's lien on land of which he still holds himself the legal estate. The vendor's lien is in such a case nothing other than the right to keep the title in his own name until he is paid and, perhaps, to exercise with or without the sanction of the Court a right of re-sale. But granting, as no doubt in some form or other is the case, that the plaintiff had an interest in the land which would support a caveat I think his caveat protected him merely against other parties who might thereafter acquire an interest from the vendor, his assignor, or from the purchaser. It did not protect him from the exercise by the purchaser of rights which he knew the purchaser had, rights, indeed, which were the very subject of his own contract with the vendor. A caveat under The Land Titles Act, is, in my view, intended as a warning to strangers not to persons with whom the caveator already has a privity of contract....