39-43, suggests that the fee tail is a complete vestige of the past.
(13.) See, e.g., DUKEMINIER ST AL., supra note 10, at 195 ("The fee tail has been replaced by the life estate as a device for controlling inheritance."); Ronald Chester, Is the Right to Devise Property Constitutionally Protected?--The Strange Case of Hodel v.
(6) Eberle's paraphrase seems to make this point, but it is clumsily worded: |There was no one better at real estate transactions: he found ways to transform the most complicated entails into writs granting fee simple; as for his writs, no one could invalidate them.' Strictly speaking, there was no such thing as a writ of either fee simple or
fee tail: fee simple was transferred primarily by livery of seisin (a public demonstration of actual possession) to which the written deed was only a witness, and though creation of a
fee tail would certainly have necessitated a deed, this document could in no sense be called a writ.