What About Law?: Studying Law at University by Catherine Barnard & Janet O'Sullivan & G J Virgo

Author:Catherine Barnard & Janet O'Sullivan & G J Virgo [Barnard, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781847317605
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2011-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

An Unforeseen Outcome

At this stage the scoreline could not but register the fact that some of the participants in this story had fared rather better than others. Parmar had got the house and the prospect of a massive profit on resale; Mr Chhokar had got no wife, a large cash bonus, a new life incognito, and probably a new woman; whereas Mrs Chhokar had got two small children and no home and was therefore compelled to live in a hostel. But how fundamentally the circumstances of life can alter! As the Bard of the North once put it, ‘the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley’. Two entirely unforeseen developments occurred which were to confound the expectations of Parmar and his feckless accomplice. A few months after the fraudulent transfer Mrs Chhokar—a brave and resourceful woman— managed to move back into her former home in Southall, still unoccupied, and to reinstate there a semblance of family life with her two children. Then even less predictably—and after an absence of two years—Mr Chhokar reappeared on the scene. The prodigal husband, it turned out, had wasted his substance in riotous living, had secretly returned to England, and had been working on the buses in Leicester. He now sought a reconciliation with his wife and children—to which, amazingly, Mrs Chhokar eventually agreed—with the consequence that things had now come full circle. Mr Chhokar resumed residence in the original matrimonial home. The Chhokars were once again living en famille under the same roof. One suspects, nonetheless, that the balance of power in the Chhokar household had altered for ever and that Mr Chhokar was made keenly aware that his whole domestic existence rested on the leave and licence of his incredibly long-suffering wife.

The only trouble was that the roof under which the Chhokars were living now belonged at law to someone else, ie Parmar. However wrongful the actions of Mr Chhokar—and no matter how complicit Parmar was in Chhokar’s dishonest design—the transfer of the matrimonial home had indeed been effective to pass the registered (ie the ‘legal’ or ‘paper’) title to Parmar. This consequence followed from the fact that, unlike equity, the common law focuses simply on the outer form of transactions. Here there had been a duly executed transfer of title perfected by the registration of Parmar as the new proprietor. And Parmar, on becoming aware that the Chhokars had been restored to a state of family life within his own house, was inevitably concerned to terminate what he perceived as a trespass upon his property. The newly reconstituted Chhokar family was equally determined to resist Parmar’s attempts to deprive them of their home. These competing concerns translated themselves into a number of legal questions which eventually required to be decided by the Court of Appeal.

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