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A lease is essentially a contract which creates an interest in land. Any contract may be made subject to certain conditions, and leases are no exception to this rule. The condition may be a condition precedent, so that the lease does not take effect at all unless the condition is fulfilled, or a condition subsequent, whereby the lease terminates should the condition on which it is granted cease to apply and the landlord therefore has a right to re-enter.

The jubilee of the Journal happens to coincide with the centenary of Head v. Tattersall, the well-known but troublesome case in which the buyer of a horse was allowed to exercise a contractual right to return it (for failure to answer a warranty that it “had been hunted with the Bicester hounds”), despite the fact that it had been accidentally injured in the meantime and could be restored to the seller only in a damaged state. Most contract textbooks cite this as the classic instance of the condition subsequent, by virtue of which a contract or obligation, although initially effective, ceases to operate on the occurence of a specified event. It is apparent, however, on closer analysis that it was not the contract or any aspect of it which was terminated because the horse failed to meet the warranty, but the buyer's title: in other words, the property in the horse passed to the buyer immediately, but defeasibly, so that when he rejected the horse he divested himself of the title and revested it in the seller. Even this explanation leaves on one side the question of the damage sustained by the horse. In the language of the law of sale, it would be most natural to regard this issue as one of risk, and to say that the court held in effect, and indeed perhaps expressly, that the horse was at the seller's risk during the period allowed for its return.