Although capital, often held in corporations and trusts, has displaced land as the dominant repository of social wealth, land law still determines the quality and cost of people's home life, where businesses and industry can be run, and where agriculture, forestry or water resources are managed.
[1] This identification of things personal with movables, though logical in theory, does not, as will be seen, perfectly express the English law, owing to the somewhat anomalous position of chattels real.
This view is the result of feudal ideas, and had no place in the Roman system, in which immovables and movables were dealt with as far as possible in the same manner, and descended according to the same rules.
Personal property may be acquired by occupancy (including the accessio, commixtio, and confusio of Roman law), by invention, as patent and copyright, or by transfer, either by the act of the law (as in bankruptcy, judgment and intestacy), or by the act of the party (as in gift, contract and will).
The main points of difference are: The law in the United States agrees in most respects with that of England.
Heirlooms are unknown, one reason being, no doubt, that the importance of title-deeds is much less than it is in England, owing to the operation of the Registration Acts.
[7] In some states railway rolling stock is considered as purely personal, in others it has been held to be a fixture, and so to partake of the nature of real property.