## Facts

- Hall owned the land in dispute.
- On August 8, 1872, Hall mortgaged the land to Leonard Morse (the demandant/plaintiff).
- Morse did not record his mortgage until September 8, 1876.
- On September 7, 1875, Hall mortgaged the same land to Clark.
- Clark took his mortgage with actual notice of Morse’s earlier mortgage.
- Clark recorded his mortgage on January 31, 1876, before Morse recorded.
- On October 4, 1881, Clark assigned his mortgage to Irving Curtis (the tenant/defendant).
- Curtis took the assignment for value and without actual knowledge of Morse’s mortgage.
- Morse and Curtis asserted competing claims of title derived from Hall.
- The trial court entered judgment for Morse; Curtis appealed on exceptions, disputing priority under the recording system and the effect of Morse’s late recording.

## Issues

1. Whether a prior mortgage that was executed earlier but recorded later, and recorded “out of the chain of title” as to a later purchaser, gives constructive notice sufficient to defeat that later purchaser’s claim.
2. Whether a bona fide assignee (Curtis) of a recorded mortgage can take priority over an earlier mortgagee (Morse) when the assignor (Clark) had actual notice of the earlier mortgage.

## Decision

- The Supreme Judicial Court concluded that Curtis’s title was entitled to priority over Morse’s, because Curtis took for value without notice and Morse’s recording did not operate as constructive notice to Curtis.
- The court reaffirmed earlier Massachusetts decisions as a settled rule governing land titles, declining to treat later contrary comments in other cases as overruling those precedents.
- The court reasoned that the registry system does not require a purchaser to search grantor indexes under names that have become “strangers to the title” after a conveyance; instruments recorded outside the purchaser’s chain are not effective notice.
- Because Hall’s mortgage to Morse was recorded after Hall had already mortgaged to Clark, a purchaser tracing title through Clark would not reasonably discover Morse’s mortgage by a standard chain-of-title search.
- A new trial was granted, with the case to proceed under the rule that protects Curtis as a bona fide purchaser without notice.

## Legal Principles

- Massachusetts recording law protects a later purchaser or mortgagee for value who takes without actual or constructive notice of a prior unrecorded interest.
- A recorded instrument does not necessarily give constructive notice to everyone; if it is recorded outside the purchaser’s chain of title (so that it would not be found by a standard title search), it is not constructive notice to that purchaser.
- The registry and indexing system is organized around following the chain of title from record owners; a purchaser is not charged with notice of instruments recorded under prior owners after they have conveyed away their apparent interest.
- When competing innocent-party considerations arise, the risk of loss may fall on the party who failed to record promptly, rather than on a later purchaser who relied on the record as the system expects.
- Prior decisions establishing how the recording system allocates notice and priority may be treated as rules of property, and courts are reluctant to disturb them because of their effect on settled land titles.

## Conclusion

Morse v. Curtis holds that an earlier mortgage, recorded only after an intervening recorded mortgage has placed the property in a new chain of title, does not give constructive notice to a later bona fide assignee who searches the chain in the ordinary way; accordingly, the later purchaser without notice (Curtis) is protected, and the court granted a new trial consistent with that priority rule.


Morse v. Curtis, 2 N.E. 929 (1885)