Pearson v. Dodd
410 F.2d 701, cert. denied,
395
Prosser, p. 78-81
Facts: Former staffers of Senator Dodd secretly took files
from his office, photocopied them, and then replaced them. Dodd sues the newspaper columnists who
published articles based on those files for conversion and invasion of
privacy. The District Court granted
partial summary judgment to Dodd on the conversion theory. The case went to the DC Circuit on
interlocutory appeal.
Issue: Do the facts support a summary judgment on the action
for conversion?
Rule: In order for conversion to occur, some property must
be interfered with in a “complete or very substantial” way.
Analysis: The court says that the documents themselves couldn’t
have been converted, because they were returned in useable condition. The court then considers whether the
documents could be considered intellectual property that could be compromised
by being merely seen and then returned.
The court decides that the records that were copied, consisting of
letters from constituents and office documents, are not intellectual property.
Conclusion: There is no conversion; the court overturns the partial
summary judgment of the District Court.
Notes and Questions
1.
It
sounds like this is a mostly outdated tort.
Even in 1969, it was almost the forgotten tort, and even when it was
brought up, in the end it didn’t really apply.
2.
The
difference between conversion and trespass to chattels is that conversion means
you recover the market price of the item converted, but you don’t get the item
itself back.
3.
Does
conversion lie in these cases?
A.
I
see why this is not conversion: the defendant did not take control of the
property, she just moved it around.
B.
I
don’t see how this case and the first case are that different, unless the
warehouse is so far away that going and getting the goods would be more
expensive than the value of the goods themselves.
C.
If the
defendant does not notify the plaintiff, it makes more sense as a conversion.
D.
This
seems like the clearest form of conversion.
This, more than the other three cases, sounds like “civil theft”.
E.
The
fire certainly results in a complete deprivation of the plaintiff’s
property rights.
4.
This
is also known as asportation. It means
carrying property away. I suppose the
main part of the damages would be the cost of getting the property back where
it was. There may also be an element of
damages to make up for the lost use of the property.
5.
So
if you use a chattel in a way you weren’t authorized to and you mess it up
badly, you could be liable for the entire replacement cost of that
chattel. So watch out!
6.
If
removing the spleen and just throwing it out is not conversion, then I don’t
believe using it to do research would constitute conversion. Either way, the doctors are completely
depriving the plaintiff of the use of the spleen, such as it is. We might suppose, however, that if the spleen
were being removed as part of treatment for a disease, it had no value to the
plaintiff or even negative value. I
don’t think the plaintiff would have a case under the tort of conversion, but
they might be able to sue for something else.
On the other hand, I suppose the plaintiff could argue that the doctors
and commercial developer deprived the patient of the use of the cells that
turned out to be valuable. The
defendants could then argue that if they had to pay for the patient’s cells,
they would have used someone else’s cells.
What about next of kin’s property interest in body parts of a
corpse? In a way, the corpse of someone
is a chattel that is useful to the decedent’s family. For many people, burying the body intact is
helpful to put closure on the person’s death.
Therefore, for the same reason that you could convert a coffin, I think
conversion could lie with a corpse.