[300]. Supra, § 112.
[301]. It has been expressly recognised by the High Court of Australia, so far as regards the Commonwealth of Australia and the constituent states: Municipal Council of Sydney v. The Commonwealth, 1 Commonwealth L. R. at p. 231, per Griffith, C. J.: “It is manifest from the whole scope of the Constitution that just as the Commonwealth and State are regarded as distinct and separate sovereign bodies,...so the Crown as representing those several bodies is to be regarded not as one, but as several juristic persons.”
[302]. Title meant originally a mark, sign, or inscription; e.g., the title of a book; titulus sepulchri, an epitaph. “Pilate wrote a title and put it on the cross.” John xix. 19. Thence more specifically it came to mean signs or evidence of right or ownership; e.g., titulus, a boundary-stone; titulus, a title-deed (Ducange). Thence the ground of right or ownership, viz., an investitive fact.
[303]. Bentham calls such facts dispositive.
[304]. We may term them, with Bentham, translative facts.
[305]. We here use the term transfer in its generic sense, as including both voluntary and involuntary changes of ownership. It has also a specific sense in which it includes only the former. Succession ab intestato, for example, is a transfer of rights in the wide sense, but not in the narrow.
[306]. This nomenclature has been suggested and adopted by Sir Frederick Pollock (Jurisprudence, p. 142). Other writers prefer to indicate acts in the law by the term juristic acts. The Germans call them Rechtsgeschäfte.
[307]. The use of the terms agreement and contract is curiously unsettled.
a. Agreement and contract are often used as synonyms, to mean a bilateral act in the law directed to the creation of an obligation, that is to say a right in personam. The objection to this usage is that we cannot afford so to waste one of these terms.
b. Contract is sometimes used to mean an agreement (in the preceding sense) enforceable by law. Pollock, Principles of Contract, p. 8. Indian Contract Act, sect. 2 (h). This, also, seems the sacrifice of a useful term to an inadequate purpose. Moreover the distinction does not conform to established usage. We habitually and conveniently speak of void, invalid, or illegal contracts.