Lawyers are constantly faced with scenarios where our clients are using terms or expressions without an appreciation of exactly what they mean. In the day to day, this can often be a very annoying experience as we essentially attempt to re-educate as we educate them on the legal meaning of the terms they commonly use.
One major area, with regard to property, is the distinction between legal vs equitable title which is often misunderstood even by non-lawyers to potentially mean the right or ability to own property under the law.
When we purchase a car, for example, the issuance of title is a test for whether or not we legally own that car. If we owe money on it, the title usually goes to the financing company until it is paid off or discharged. This is how we tend to understand ownership.
In the “legal vs equitable title” context however, it becomes a different affair altogether. When someone says that they have “title” to something, they mean that they have a legal interest in it. The law says that they own it and can do whatever they wish with it. This is the most common understanding.
The distinction though comes into play when we are dealing with equitable ownership of an object or subject matter. On the one hand, there is the legal owner (the person who has title) while also, there is a legal interest (beneficial interest) held by another party. The latter does not yet have legal or real ownership of the property in question but may have been relying on it for a significant duration of time and contributed to its use and mass appeal. This is the fairest way to understand the underlying principle in the legal vs equitable title debate.
And so, when someone does not yet own property in the title sense, the benefits of their work from using the property accrue to the legal title holder.
Why is this important? Well, in terms of language acquisition, it is about the distinction between ownership of the language spoken by a group of people and the language that is spoken. Think about it. The language itself is essentially the legal owner. The first people who may have spoken or written the language, if they are no longer alive, cannot be further considered the owners of the language. These are the people who set the standards, the rules and, to some extent, the grammar.
But all those who have spent their lives studying languages and linguistics, learning words, phrases, idioms and slang or whatever else characterizes it, do not own the language. Instead, by spending years of their lives working with the language, they essentially become the beneficial owners.
For more information on property law, you can visit Wikipedia’s page on Property Law.