
Professor David Dana of Northwestern University School of Law made some interesting observations in his article The Feudal Mistake on the problem that the carving up of mortgages in securitized trusts has created whereby it is nearly impossible to re-work a mortgage. Professor Dana reviews how excessive fragmentation of ownership interests has been dealt with by English and American property law where judges created and used legal doctrines to "undo the excessive fragmentation of ownership interest in land" such as in feudal England and oil rights in nineteenth and early twentieth century. Professor Dana writes that "[o]ur property law and property rights tradition simply does not require, or even allow, our lawmakers to sit back while the ill-advised chopping up of property into competing interests creates a gridlock that undermines national prosperity. As Abraham Lincoln famously remarked, the Constitution is not a suicide pact."