Definition
"Of entry" is a qualifying phrase used in property law to describe the nature of a legal right or action connected to the physical or legal act of entering land. It appears most distinctly in three recognized compound forms:
1. RIGHT OF ENTRY: The power held by a grantor or their successor to reclaim possession of property upon the occurrence of a specified condition subsequent. The holder does not automatically regain title but must take affirmative action — traditionally by physically entering the land, later by bringing a legal action.
2. WRIT OF ENTRY: A common law real action by which a disseised owner sought to recover seisin of land from a wrongful possessor. This was a foundational form of action in the early common law system before ejectment displaced it.
3. LETTERS OF ENTRY: A Scottish and feudal instrument issued by a feudal superior to a mortgagor (wadsetter) who had redeemed their land, formally re-admitting them as a vassal. Without letters of entry, the redeeming mortgagor stood as a stranger to the superior's title upon redemption.
The phrase "of entry" does not stand alone as a self-contained legal term. It functions as a modifier that, combined with a preceding noun, identifies a distinct legal concept. Each compound carries its own doctrinal history.
Common Confusion
The three compounds built on "of entry" are frequently conflated by researchers unfamiliar with the feudal property system from which they emerged. A RIGHT OF ENTRY is a future interest retained by a grantor — it concerns the power to defeat an estate. A WRIT OF ENTRY is a procedural vehicle — a common law real action — that had nothing to do with future interests but rather with recovering possession from a wrongful holder. LETTERS OF ENTRY belong to the feudal superior-vassal relationship and have no meaningful counterpart in modern American or English property law. Treating these three as interchangeable will produce serious research errors, particularly when reading older treatises or cases.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Right of Entry (also called Power of Termination): Future interest retained after a conveyance on condition subsequent. Distinguished from possibility of reverter, which operates automatically.
Writ of Entry: Common law real action to recover seisin. Had multiple degrees (sur disseisin, sur intrusion, sur alienation) limiting who could sue and against whom, based on how many intermediate possessors had intervened.
Letters of Entry: Feudal/Scottish instrument. Issued by the superior of land to re-admit a mortgagor to vassal status after redemption of a wadset.
Why It Matters in Research
The phrase "of entry" functions as a taxonomic marker in historical property law research, and its meaning shifts entirely depending on which compound form the source is using. A researcher encountering "of entry" in a nineteenth-century English or Scottish source must first identify which compound is meant before applying any analytical framework.
The writ of entry as a real action was largely obsolete in American jurisdictions before the Civil War, replaced by ejectment. Sources that discuss "writs of entry" are almost certainly engaging in historical or comparative analysis, not describing living procedure — but they may not say so explicitly.
The right of entry as a future interest remains very much alive in modern property law and appears routinely in deeds, trusts, and landlord-tenant instruments. The terminological shift from "right of entry for condition broken" to "power of termination" (the Restatement's preferred term) creates a lexical trap: older case law uses "right of entry" where modern restatement-influenced sources say "power of termination," but they mean the same thing.
Letters of entry, as described by Rapalje & Lawrence, are specific to Scottish feudal tenure and the wadset system. A researcher encountering this term outside of Scottish legal history or comparative property scholarship is likely reading a source that has been incorrectly generalized.
The corpus connections here are significant: the right of entry as a future interest connects directly to the defeasible estates framework, to possibility of reverter, and to the Rule Against Perpetuities as applied to future interests in grantors. The writ of entry connects to the history of real actions and the displacement of those actions by ejectment.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence address "of entry" only through the compound REGRESS, LETTERS OF (treating letters of entry as an alternative name for letters of regress in the Scottish feudal context). Their account is valuable precisely because it explains the procedural logic that made letters of entry necessary: the wadset (Scottish mortgage) completely divested the mortgagor, so upon redemption the mortgagor appeared before the superior as a stranger. Without a formal instrument of re-entry — letters of entry or regress — the superior was no more obligated to accept the returning mortgagor than any unrelated third party. This illuminates why the instrument existed: feudal tenure required formal acknowledgment of the vassal relationship at every stage, and redemption alone did not restore it.
Historical dictionaries generally do not treat "of entry" as an independent headword, which correctly reflects its nature as a modifier rather than a freestanding term. Researchers should look under the primary noun — RIGHT, WRIT, LETTERS — in historical sources.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Future Interests — Reversion, Possibility of Reverter, Right of Entry (The Law Mind Property Law Encyclopedia): Primary reference for the right of entry as a future interest, its relationship to condition subsequent estates, and its distinction from possibility of reverter.