Among them is Article 3, which includes marketable title provisions. Such legislation has a history going back to the work of Simes and Taylor at the University of Michigan. In 1990, the Uniform Law Commissioners have taken marketable title provisions from Article 3 of the Uniform Simplification of Land Transactions Act and have created from them a free-standing act that may be enacted by itself. The MMTA attacks the curse of the hidden ancient interests in land. In American property law, interests in land can be diverse and multiple.
Some interests appear on the land records.
As time passes, the opportunity for multiple interests of various kinds to arise with respect to any piece of identified geography increases. When any piece of geography currently passes, the question always arises, how far back should the title search go to identify any possible interests that may exist in the land. The problem is not current interests. Those are detectable and usually apparent. The problem is ancient interests that nobody has asserted for a very long time and so go unnoticed.