 The Riddle of the Good Faith PurchaserMichael J R Crawford Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 2025, vol. 45, issue 1, 167-192 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. Keywords: law and economics; property law; commercial law (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:oxjlsj:v:45:y:2025:i:1:p:167-192. Access Statistics for this article Oxford Journal of Legal Studies is currently edited by Liz Fisher, Stefan Enchelmaier, Andreas Televantos, Liora Lazarus and Jennifer Payne More articles in Oxford Journal of Legal Studies from Oxford University Press |
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