A very ordinary situation lay behind a decision of Colin Edelman QC in

the QBD on 8 February this year. You buy a commercial building (here an

old RAF station) and find it's full of stuff (actually an old film-set)

when you take over. Are you liable in conversion if you then trash the

stuff, assuming -- wrongly -- that no-one cares about it?

This is a difficult one. The fact that you're an involuntary bailee

won't help: the fact that you don't have positively to look after goods

thrust on you doesn't allow you deliberately to destroy them.

Nevertheless Edelman manages to say you may escape even here, by

confirming yet another hole in strict liability in conversion. A person

in involuntary  possession of goods who reasonably believes (having in a

suitable case made enquiries) that he's entitled to deal with them, e.g.

because they've been abandoned, is protected from liability. In the

event the defendant escaped on this ground.

There's also a helpful suggestion (yet again) that abandonment of goods

is possible in English law, and if shown destroys title in the same way

as derelictio did in Rome.

All the best

Andrew

--

Andrew M Tettenborn

Bracton Professor of Law, University of Exeter

Snailmail:

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LAWYER, n.

One skilled in circumvention of the law. (Ambrose Bierce, 1906).