Michael J R Crawford, The Riddle of the Good Faith #Purchaser, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Volume 45, Issue 1, Spring 2025, Pages 167–192, https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqae037 <br /><br />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 <br />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 <br />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. <br /><br />Creative Commons <br />This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. <br /><br />You are not required to obtain permission to reuse this article. <br /><br />https://academic.oup.com/ojls/article/45/1/167/7900629# <br /><br />PLEASE NOTE: This podcast may contain errors and therefore it is essential to read and understand the actual source document.
