The Principles of Personal Property Law

The law of personal property covers a wide spectrum of scenarios and has had little detailed scrutiny of its overarching structure over the years. This is a shame. It is a system and can best be understood as a system. This new textbook provides a comprehensive and detailed coverage of personal property law in England and Wales. It includes transfer of legal title to chattels, the nemo dat rule, negotiable instruments, and assignment of choses in action. The book 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 generalizations across different contexts about the nature of the concepts applied in English law. Throughout the book, concepts are explained rigorously, with reference to how they are used in commercial practice and everyday life. The book will be useful to students in undergraduate commercial law courses, or related LLM courses, as well as those in integrated property law courses and, particularly, specialized personal property modules. It will also benefit academics and practitioners.