The Land Registration Act 2002 – the Show on the Road

This article reviews the Land Registration Act 2002, taking advantage of the deeper perspective afforded by the intervening decade, and absorbing subsequent developments – and, in the case of the Act's electronic conveyancing project, non‐developments – that have also come to contribute to the picture. It suggests especially that while the Act's central idea of conclusive, indeed ‘constitutive’, registration can be beneficial, its deployment here has been problematic. In particular, the lapse of electronic conveyancing, and the possibility (resisted by the courts) that conclusive registration can be procured by fraudsters, have diminished the control that parties have over dispositions of their own title, to the detriment of their autonomy; and over‐preoccupation with the central idea has resulted in a failure to think carefully enough about problems to which it was never going to be the answer.     

Separation and Detection of Smokeless Powder Additives by Ultra Performance Liquid Chromatography with Tandem Mass Spectrometry (UPLC/MS/MS),

A reversed phase gradient ultra performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC/MS/MS) method has been developed for the analysis of smokeless powders. A total of 20 different components were separated by UPLC and detected by MS/MS in multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) mode. These compounds included diphenylamines, centralites, nitrotoluenes, nitroglycerin, and various phthalates. Simultaneous positive and negative electrospray ionization (ESI) was used along with negative atmospheric pressure chemical ionization (APCI) to detect all compounds in a single analysis. Analysis times were under 8 min with a gradient of 10–73% organic at a flow rate of 0.500 mL/min. With this method, ultraviolet and MRM limits of detection ranging from 0.08 to 2.6 ng and 0.4–64 ng injected were achieved. Commercially available smokeless powders were also extracted with methylene chloride and characterized using the developed UPLC/MS/MS method. The procedure permits the determination of compositional differences between different brands as well as lot‐to‐lot variations.