Summary

Land registers have been kept in the re-established Republic of Estonia for more than five years. The Law of Property Act was drafted on the basis of the 1940 draft Civil Code and the part concerning land registers in the draft Code was directly modelled on the Swiss Civil Code.
The practice concerning land registers has shown that the legal bases for the activities of land registers are not regulated in sufficient detail and that the proper functioning of the system is impeded by the fact that a combination of several legal models was used.
The author focuses on the system of Estonian land registers and points out several shortcomings in the Land Register Act and its conflicts with the Law of Property Act. However, the author is convinced that the entire mechanism of the law of property would not have started to function without a major revision of other basic principles of the law of property if any other register system had been applied.