The common-law mortgage has been much maligned. Legal historians have called it everything from “clumsy” to “mendacious.” Following their lead, the current Restatement (Third) of Property: Mortgages, and the leading treatise on mortgage law, denounce the modern incarnation of the...

The ‘equity of redemption' is an equitable doctrine undergirding the law of secured lending in the common-law world. It holds that despite any legal forms to the contrary, a borrower remains the true owner of pledged/mortgaged property, with a right to redeem such property upon payment of...

For more than two and half centuries, the case of Emmanuel College v Evans (1626) has been understood as a leading case for the origin of the principal doctrine of mortgage law: the equity of redemption. A closer inspection shows that it has nothing to do with the equity of redemption. This...