MASSACHUSETTS PRACTICE. VOLUME 28. CONVEYANCING WITH FORMS.

By Maurice E. Park '44 andDorcas D. Park of the Massachusetts Bar.Boston: Boston Law Book Company,1968. 888 pp. $27.50.

This book is the 28th volume of the Massachusetts Practice Series, a comprehensive modern collection of text-reference books, each dealing with one of the everyday aspects of the practice of law in Massachusetts. Each volume is designed to provide the working Massachusetts lawyer with a ready textual explanation of the problems he faces from day to day. The fact that this 28th volume contains 888 pages gives some indication of the mass of legal rules, principles, and information the modern lawyer must have at his fingertips to carry on a normal everyday practice.

This volume by Maurice and Dorcas Park, however, is confined to the transferring of land by deed, mortgage, lease, death, eminent domain, etc., with a description and explanation of the means, methods, instruments, and pitfalls involved. It is readable by a layman, who will emerge at the far end shaking his head in wonderment at how in the world simple things could get so complicated, but it is by no means designed for laymen's casual reading, but rather for the working library of the working Massachusetts lawyer. The principles are set forth in the text, with copious footnotes referring to or abstracting specific cases. This is the art form once described by Harold Laski as "containing oases of text in a desert of footnotes." Actually it is well adapted to the use to which it is put.

The lawyer, for instance, who must draw a deed to a partnership must know not only how to describe the partnership by name but also how to make sure that the title to the property is held by the partnership and not by the partners as individual joint tenants or tenants in common. He must also have an appreciation of what consequences flow from the holding of title in the name of the partnership.

A discussion of partnership titles occupies four pages of this book. The footnotes refer to the Massachusetts partnership statute, nine law review articles and eighteen decided cases. This is an example from four pages out of 888 of the kind of scholarship which goes into a work of this kind.

The Massachusetts bar is grateful for all such works and for this book in particular.

Mr. Ley is a graduate of Harvard LawSchool '38 and practices law in Boston withthe firm of Grabill, Ley & Butterworth.