A Treatise on the Law of Personal Property

Abstract

Designed primarily as a handbook for students, this volume sweeps the field—if a rag-bag collection of loose ends can be called a field—of the traditional law school course in Personal Property. Its main divisions and titles are those of the standard casebooks. There is an opening chapter (the least imaginative and least adequate of the book) on the nature of law, general definitions, and property classifications. This is followed by eight chapters on the acquisition and transfer of rights in personal property: original acquisition, finding, adverse possession, judgment and satisfaction of judgment, accession and confusion, gift (of chattels and of choses in action), sale (largely of the rights of the bona fide purchaser). Next come six chapters on questions arising "when one person has a limited interest in the personal property of another:" bailments (nature and distinctions, rights and duties, special types—including common carriers and innkeepers), liens (parties possessed and enforcement, transfer, and loss), and pledges. Two concluding chapters—"chiefly the product of work of Professor Jacob H. Beuscher"—are on topics "athwart the fields of personal and real property:" fixtures and emblements.