The main legal point established in the judgment is that a suit for specific performance of a contract for the sale of land is not considered a suit for land within the meaning of Clause (12) of the Letters Patent, as it primarily involves the enforcement of an obligation and does not directly affect the title or possession of the land.

Murray Coutts Trotter, Kt., C.J.

1. I have had the advantage of reading the judgment about to be pronounced by my brother Ramesam, and I entirely concur in it. I only add a few words of my own in order to bring out certain points which he has made with which I find myself in specific and emphatic agreement.

2. The first is that our opinion is directed to a concrete and isolated case, that of a suit by a purchaser of land for specific performance against his vendor of the contract for the sale of land entered into by his vendor; and is not to be considered as containing in gremio analogies which can be usefully applied to such subject-matters as vendors suits for specific performance, suits on mortgages, suits for maintenance, suits for the wrongful removal of surface trees or subterranean coal. A number of decisions have been cited to us on these and kindred topics. Some of them I think to be wrong, others very doubtful, but of all of them it appears to me to be enough to say that they do not directly bear on the point before us and that our decision leaves future discussion on such questions entirely at large.

3. Secondly, I am satisfied that a phrase like "suit for land" can only be defined, if it has to be defined, by what logicians call "enumeration of categories," as Mackay, J., forcibly pointed out in the course of the argument. That is to say, that the legislature can only help us by setting out what it intends to be included in the term "suits for land" and what excluded; a method of legislation which has been pursued not unsuccessfully in the explanations and illustrations to many Sections of Indian Acts. That has not been done here; and we are left to ourselves to fit the statutory words as best we can to each case as it comes before us. Such attempts as have been made to arrive at a definition on other lines have only resulted in prefixing an adverb to the words of the statute--the favourite one being "substantially." That seems to me merely to add an unnecessary task to our original one: the imponderable adverb "substantially" itself calls for a definition, a task more difficult in my opinion than the definition of the actual words of the Letters Patent. The truth is that many Indian statutes fall into one of two extremes. They sometimes throw at the Courts cryptic expressions without a word of explanation or illustration to show what was the real intention of the Legislature and this is an instance. On the other hand, it sometimes passes Acts which are obviously intended to deal with every conceivable case that can arise--which means of course every case that was present to the mind of the draftsman. The Limitation Act offers a striking example of both. The Act with all its 31 Sections and 183 articles has no specific article to deal with so obvious a case as that of a simple suit for debt. On the other hand into Article 183 it has introduced the term "revived" without a word of definition or explanation; the inevitable result has followed that the Indian Courts for half a century have been compelled to delve in venerable English reports to acquire learning about writs of scire facias and the like, a task which ought never to have been set them.

4. Finally, I wish to make it clear that my decision is not based on any consideration that specific relief was as a matter of history administered by Courts of Equity and not Courts of Common Law in England, or even that in its essence and nature it was an equitable and not a legal remedy. These considerations do not seem to me to go to the root of the matter for this country, for the simple reason that here the remedy, whatever its origin be, is prescribed by statute. But I do not think that the statute overrides one fundamental juridical distinction, which obtains in every organized community in the world: vis., that between decrees that affect the status of individuals, or bring about proprio vigore an immediate change in the ownership of property, and decrees whic