{"title":"The Riddle of the Good Faith Purchaser.","authors":"Michael J R Crawford","doi":"10.1093/ojls/gqae037","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>A purchaser unwittingly buys stolen goods. The owner from whom they were stolen demands their return. The purchaser refuses. How should the law resolve their dispute? This article argues that the law's primary objective in resolving disputes between owners and good faith purchasers should not be to achieve 'justice' between the parties but to disincentivise theft. With some categories of goods, it is difficult to see how the legal attribution of liability can achieve this end. However, where goods are amenable to registration, the rules of good faith purchase can discourage theft by conditioning an owner's success over a good faith purchaser on the fact of prior registration. In the absence of a register, there seems little to choose between the parties. However, because the favoured party will frequently be a monopolist, the danger of holdouts warrants employing innovations from auction theory, the effect of which is to force the parties to reveal otherwise private information about their subjective valuations of the disputed goods.</p>","PeriodicalId":47225,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Journal of Legal Studies","volume":"45 1","pages":"167-192"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4000,"publicationDate":"2024-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11928221/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Oxford Journal of Legal Studies","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqae037","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2025/1/1 0:00:00","PubModel":"eCollection","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"LAW","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
A purchaser unwittingly buys stolen goods. The owner from whom they were stolen demands their return. The purchaser refuses. How should the law resolve their dispute? This article argues that the law's primary objective in resolving disputes between owners and good faith purchasers should not be to achieve 'justice' between the parties but to disincentivise theft. With some categories of goods, it is difficult to see how the legal attribution of liability can achieve this end. However, where goods are amenable to registration, the rules of good faith purchase can discourage theft by conditioning an owner's success over a good faith purchaser on the fact of prior registration. In the absence of a register, there seems little to choose between the parties. However, because the favoured party will frequently be a monopolist, the danger of holdouts warrants employing innovations from auction theory, the effect of which is to force the parties to reveal otherwise private information about their subjective valuations of the disputed goods.
期刊介绍:
The Oxford Journal of Legal Studies is published on behalf of the Faculty of Law in the University of Oxford. It is designed to encourage interest in all matters relating to law, with an emphasis on matters of theory and on broad issues arising from the relationship of law to other disciplines. No topic of legal interest is excluded from consideration. In addition to traditional questions of legal interest, the following are all within the purview of the journal: comparative and international law, the law of the European Community, legal history and philosophy, and interdisciplinary material in areas of relevance.