Estoppel By Deed

*Note: This legal doctrine is unrelated to my previous post on estoppel letters.  Lawyers love reusing words to indicate different concepts.  It keeps everyone on their toes.

This question just came up while examining a chain of title:
An over-zealous seller transferred property to the buyer BEFORE the seller actually owned it.  The seller acquired the property the next week, and the deed granting ownership to the seller was recorded before the deed granting ownership to the buyer.  So the chain as recorded looked like this:

Owner -> Seller -> Buyer

But in actuality was this:

January 1: Seller->Buyer
January 7: Owner -> Seller

The question is, does the buyer own the property even though the seller had no title to transfer when he transferred title to the buyer.

The answer is yes.  Because of the legal doctrine of Estoppel By Deed.  This is a common sense doctrine (something we should all be pleasantly surprised to see in American property law).  The seller can't claim good title when selling the property and then deny that he had title at the time of transfer and keep the property for himself. Without this doctrine, the law would provide the buyer with the legal remedy of suing the seller to demand a new deed.  Instead, the court saves everyone time and money by treating the seller's good title as if it reaches back to the original deed and stopping him from claiming otherwise.