Property
Class Notes
More on South Staffordshire and its application to Hannah
The
owner of the locus in quo won in this
case. There are four different possible
theories for explaining this case.
The
court says that the possession of land carries with it everything attached to
or under the land. The brooch in Hannah
was neither.
How
does this case help us decide Hannah v. Peel?
The brooch was just lying around.
It wasn’t buried. It wasn’t
attached to anything. It was under the
roof, but that doesn’t really mean the same thing.
How
about the fact that the locus in quo
was private property in this case, while it was public property in Bridges?
Was Peel’s place private property at the time? Does it make a difference that it was taken
by the government for the war? It was
being used as a hospital. Isn’t that the
same as a shop in a sense? An argument
can be made that a hospital is a least as public as a shop, depending on where
in the hospital you are. We don’t know
what part of the building the brooch was found in.
Really,
there’s a spectrum between public and private.
Private homes are very private, while the public library is very
public. Then you have shops and other
businesses that are open to people who have business there. So if this is the holding of
What
about the “limited purpose” explanation?
Sharman was invited to clean the pool and not to find things. Hannah’s purpose was to be a
lance-corporal. The thing is that
Sharman lost, while Hannah won. If this
had been a limited purpose case, Hannah arguably could have lost.
The
problem with this opinion is that it throws out lots of cases and holdings, but
the court doesn’t say why they’re relevant.
How
important is the plaintiff’s “good behavior” in turning over the brooch to the
authorities? The court doesn’t say
explicitly.
So
we have a good brief, but then it peters out.
It creates a lot of possibilities but doesn’t resolve them into a
particular holding of the case. So don’t
be like this judge!
What
does the court do? Look at the last paragraph of the opinion. Was the brooch really lost? What is “lost property”? If someone is unintentionally dispossessed of
something, it is lost. If someone
intentionally leaves something somewhere and then they forget about it, then it’s
mislaid.
How
did the brooch get where it ended up?
Was it lost or mislaid? How could
you lose something “up high”? Mislaid
property goes to the owner of the locus
in quo, while lost property goes to the finder.
What
assumptions does the court make that aren’t supported by the facts?
Even
though Peel doesn’t own property, he may still have the power to sell it if he’s
not a thief. The shop to which Peel sold
the brooch acquires good title to the brooch.
Peel’s title was voidable. If he still had the brooch, Hannah could have
gotten it back. But a voidable title allows you to convey good
title to a good-faith purchaser for value.
On the other hand, a void
title is the kind a thief has. If you
buy from a thief, even in good faith, you don’t acquire good title.
If
Hannah is entitled to the brooch, then he is entitled to its full value. But what is the full value of the
brooch? Is it the value that Peel sold
it for, or is it the value that the shop resold it for? Should Hannah get the higher amount or the
lower amount? If Peel made a bad deal,
Hannah would be entitled to the full price rather than the “bad deal” price.
What
if Peel had lived in the house? Would
that have made a difference? Peel would
be more likely to win in that case. If
Peel had lived in this private place, it looks like we would give the property
to him and say he was the possessor of the property.
What
reasonable expectations are protecting?
If Peel has guests over to his house, he expects that people won’t take
stuff from his house even if he doesn’t know it’s there. The law encourages a great expectation of
privacy at home.
What
if Hannah had been a trespasser? Well,
we don’t want to reward a thief. But
then what do we do with “first in time, first in right”? How do we resolve the conflict? We could have a special rule for trespassers,
but that’s not how it’s done. Instead,
we use the constructive possession doctrine.
Constructive possession
Constructive
possession is an exception to the
factual element of possession. Constructive possession is a way to say that we’ll
pretend there is possession even though there really isn’t. But why do we pretend? There needs to be a rationale, or it just
seems nutty. “Constructive” means it’s a
legal fiction. We’ll treat you like you’re
in possession every though you’re not.
We want to do that because we want to apply the rule of “first in time,
first in right”. So we give Peel constructive
possession against trespassers because we want to protect public order.
When
we say somebody is in constructive possession, we’ll pretend that they have
possession because we want a certain outcome to follow. Whether you’re in possession or not depends a
lot on what objective the law is trying to achieve. Take, for example, possession of
narcotics. That type of possession will
be defined much more broadly than we define possession of lost property. We use the law as an instrumentality, bending
a set of rules to a particular purpose.
When
you learn the law, you must accept that you can’t rely just on doctrine and
definitions. You can’t just look up “possession”
in Black’s and know what it means. Look
at Constitutional Law. You have a little
tiny document that you can carry around in your pocket, but then you have a
huge casebook you need to figure out what it means. So you can’t interpret the Constitution just
by looking up the words it contains.
The law as stated can never
be a complete explanation. You must ask the question: “What
is the purpose of the law? Are we
applying this law in a way that defeats its purpose? If so, we need to change the definitions to
meet our goal.” Judges don’t like to
change too much law at once because they are afraid of unintended consequences.
If
a definition runs into problems with an important policy objective, we’ll
dispense with it.
Lost
property typically goes to the finder.
Mislaid property typically goes to the locus in quo (the true owner may retrace their steps). But it’s tough to distinguish between lost
and mislaid property! Say you’re in a
barber shop and you see an envelope with lots of money sticking out. If the money was mislaid, it goes to the
barber. If it’s lost, it goes to you,
the customer. So what do we do? The money is sitting on a table. So the thing you do if you want the money is
kick it to the ground. Then you’re
within Bridges.
What’s
the point of this? When you frame these
rules, you want to do it in a way such that you don’t give people the incentive
to lie or be manipulative. So Braunstein
says the “lost/mislaid” distinction is problematic for two reasons: (1) It
requires us to infer the intent of someone who is always absent: the true owner. If the true owner showed up, they would win
out over both the finder and the owner of the locus in quo. (2) The distinction tends to encourage finders
to manipulate the circumstances to make the property look lost and not mislaid.
Abandoned
property also goes to the finder.
Treasure trove is an ancient concept that started with (maybe?) Henry
VIII. He made monasteries subject to
tax. The monks went and hid their assets
by burying them. They had the intention
to return to claim the stuff. This still
happens every once in a while. In