The Substantially Similar Weblog

I finished the multiple choice part of the Massachusetts Bar Exam today. Now just ten essays, and by 6pm tomorrow I’ll be a free man, although not yet a lawyer.

One of the basic canons of the multiple choice portion of the bar exam is “if the answer is a doctrine you’ve never heard of, it’s the wrong choice.” Unfortunately, a countervailing canon is “the bar examiners often like to use less-known synonyms for well known concepts to trick you.” (I made this canon up myself, but it’s true.)

I got one of these today, and went with my intuition/countervailing canon idea, and as I’m checking it out now, it turns out I was right. The “doctrine of after-acquired title” is equivalent to “estoppel by deed.” Well, it’s actually not quite equivalent, because estoppel by deed only applies to prevent the grantor from denying the validity of a deed, invalid at the time of the conveyance because the grantor didn’t have good title at the time but did at a later date after the conveyance, while the doctrine of after-acquired title is good against other claimants, but it’s basically the same idea.

So, at least one right out of 200!

(How many hits will I get in the future on a google search for “doctrine of after-acquired title”? We shall see…)

Update: Ari points out that a google search for doctrine of after-acquired title with no quotation marks gives this blog entry as the number one result.