judicial scrutiny of "use on a use". Francis Bacon argued for the defence. The case is replete with desultory and curious discussion which, in the opinion of Lord Hardwicke, is difficult to understand. The disposition and policy of the judges was to check contingent uses, which they deemed to be productive of mischiefs and tending to perpetuities. They regarded the Statute of Uses as intending to extirpate uses, which were often found to be subtle and fraudulent contrivances. Their evident object was to restore the simplicity and integrity of the common law. The great controversy in Chudleigh's Case was whether the Statute of Uses had reduced the feoffee to uses to a mere conduit pipe through which possession passed to the , or whether he still retained some of the old powers he had before the Statute of Uses. What the majority judges sought in the case was just what the projectors of the present property reform in England were after, the free alienability of land. Chudleigh's Case became known as the Case of Perpetuities. The case turned on the doctrine of which Bacon called metaphysics of the worst kind. (Latin: a spark of right) is a legal fiction allowing feoffees to uses to support contingent uses when they come into existence, thereby to enable the Statute of Uses to execute them. Chudleigh's Case represented the turning point of the old medieval common law of , and the trend towards modernity. Bacon suggested that Justice Coke had "ripped uses from their cradle". United States cases Town of Pawlet v. Clark (1815) In the 1815 case of Town of Pawlet v. Clark the United States Supreme Court found that a Royal grant of land to the Church of England in the colony of New Hampshire was not completed. The grant had been made prior to the American Revolutionary War, and the State of Vermont, as successor to the English Crown, could claim the land and convey it to the town of Pawlet for schools. The nature of the trust which held the land was found to be void. The Episcopal Church in the town had no right or title to the land. Terrett v. Taylor (1815) In the 1815 case of Terrett v. Taylor, the United States Supreme Court found that the State of Virginia could not expropriate property of the formerly established Episcopal Church or abolish its incorporation. At issue