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  Identity of the corpus - A W A Salam   The Identity of the Corpus in Partition Actions At the threshold of every partition action lies a controlling requirement: the clear identification of the corpus At the threshold of every partition action lies a controlling requirement: the clear identification of the corpus. This requirement is foundational in character. It is not a matter of pleading convenience, nor is it a mere procedural formality. It conditions the very exercise of jurisdiction by the Court. Unless the land sought to be partitioned is first identified with certainty, no valid inquiry into title can meaningfully begin, no reliable allocation of shares can be made, and no decree capable of binding the world can properly be entered. A partition action differs from an ordinary civil dispute in one decisive respect. Its decree operates in rem. It does not merely bind the parties who appeared before Court. It concludes title in relation to the land itself and ...

  THE LAW OF PARTITION IN CEYLON [Contributed by W. R. BISScHOP, ESQ., LL.D.] Co-ownership. —“Nemo invicem in communione maner …” This maxim, formed in the Civil Law, laid the basis of a mode of acquisition of property. If the co-owners of property could not come to a mutual understanding as to its division, partition could be enforced by any one of them against all the others, and the adjudication of the judge was considered as forming for each person the proprietary title to such part as had been allotted to him. The judgment formed a similar proprietary title in the case of a division of an inheritance and in an action for the regulation of the boundaries of neighbouring lands. The mode of procedure was clearly set out, and by the practice of centuries the rules as to these actions, which must have been of common occurrence in a rural community, had been well established. The actions were duplices—that is to say, the parties might be called upon to act both as plaintiffs a...

  An Exposition of the concept of Per Incuriam in Sri Lankan Law   The strength of a legal system lies not merely in its capacity to decide disputes, but in its ability to correct itself without undermining its own foundations. The doctrine per incuriam represents one such carefully regulated mechanism. It is neither a device of insubordination nor a shortcut to avoid precedents, but a principled exception that permits the law to undo an error where such errors arise from ignorance of binding laws or decisions.   In its classical formulation, a decision is said to be per incuriam literally, “through lack of care”, when it has been rendered in ignorance or forgetfulness of a binding statutory provision or a binding judicial authority.   The doctrine does not apply merely because a decision is considered incorrect. It applies only where the court has failed to notice a rule of law which was directly applicable and which, had it been considered, would necessar...

  PARTITION LAW NO 21 OF1977 The law relating to the death of a party and the substitution of a legal representative in partition actions has undergone a profound and carefully structured evolution. When examined across the successive legislative regimes and judicial pronouncements, it reveals a clear movement away from procedural convention toward a statutory model grounded in finality and conclusiveness. The modern position cannot be appreciated unless one traces this development from its earliest doctrinal foundations through the statutory transformations and the judicial corrections that followed.   In the earliest phase, under the Partition Ordinance during the middle of the twentieth century, there existed no specialized statutory mechanism dealing with substitution in partition proceedings. The matter was governed by the general principles of civil procedure. The death of a party was treated as a serious procedural event which interrupted the continuity of the proce...