Bailment

Abstract: The law of personal property covers a very wide spectrum of scenarios and, unfortunately, has had little detailed scrutiny of its overarching structure over the years. It is a system and can best be understood as a system. Indeed, without understanding it as a system, it becomes much more difficult to comprehend. The second edition of this acclaimed textbook continues to provide a comprehensive yet detailed coverage of the law of personal property in England and Wales. It includes transfer of legal title to chattels, the nemo dat rule, negotiable instruments and assignment of choses in action. It also looks at defective transfers of property and the resulting proprietary claims, including those contingent on tracing, the tort of conversion, bailment and security interests. By bringing together areas often scattered throughout company law, commercial law, trusts and tort textbooks, it enables readers to see common themes and issues and to make otherwise impossible generalisations across different contexts about the nature of the concepts English law applies. Throughout the book, concepts are explained rigorously, with reference to how they are used in commercial practice and everyday life. The new edition also includes a new chapter on secured transactions law reform, and introduces new material on the Cape Town Convention, IP rights and other intangible property. The book will be of primary interest to academics and practitioners in the area. However, it will also be of use to students studying commercial or personal property law.

Abstract: 1. Property Rights and Classes of Property 2. Interests in Chattels and Bailment 3. The Protection of Property Interests in Chattels 4. Further Property Protection and its Limits 5. The Conveyance 6. Transfer of Title 7. Transfer of Intangible Property 8. Security Interests in Personal Property

Abstract: Modern law often rests on the assumption that a uniform costbenefit formula is the proper way to determine fault in ordinary contract disputes. This Article disputes that vision by defending the view that different standards of fault are appropriate in different contexts. The central distinction is one that holds parties in gratuitous transactions only to the standard of care that they bring to their own affairs, while insisting on the higher objective standard of ordinary care in commercial transactions. That bifurcation leads to efficient searches. Persons who hold themselves out in particular lines of business in effect warrant their ability to achieve uniform standards, while individuals who seek favors from their friends are incentivized to choose them carefully given the subjective standard of care. These results, moreover, derive from the Roman conceptions of care brought into the Anglo-American law through the 1703 decision in Coggs v. Bernard, and are shown to have surprising durability in dealing with agency, medical malpractice, occupier liability, guest statute, and frustration cases. Often the efficient standard of fault is given only to those who do economics without really trying.

Abstract: A central issue in the law of security over movable property is the recognition of, and the regulatory implications of recognizing, a secured transaction. Systems of law derived from Article 9 of the United States Uniform Commercial Code take as their point of departure what at first sight is a unitary conception of such a transaction, which is described in terms of the "intention" underlying it, or its "substance". In the view of the authors, such a conception cannot be sustained except as a way of asking the question of whether a transaction is appropriately viewed as a secured one for the purposes of the legal issue at hand. Indeed, the problems encountered in attempting to apply a purely functional analysis to title-based transactions such as conditional sale, bailment, and trust -- and to legal issues arising outside of, if closely connected to, the ones which Article 9 systems address -- show that concepts which focus on the distinction between what is owned and what is owed may be unavoidable in the law. The heuristic nature of functional analysis enables one to see that other systems of law without such a unitary conception of "security" as that identified with Article 9 may reach appropriate legal results at least as efficiently and fairly as Article 9 systems, and may do so with less risk of eliminating the non-security aspects of the transaction.