INTRODUCTION
This article questions whether English law contains rules which could plausibly be understood to be equivalent to the Roman rules of specificatio. It is commonly said that there do exist such rules, and that those rules determine that the manufacturer of a new thing, where that new thing is created from a chattel belonging to another, will acquire the best legal title to that thing. Thus, the title that was previously held by the owner of the initial chattel is destroyed, although it may be replaced by some other legal interest, such as a personal right to damages held against the manufacturer. This is the description of English law that is offered in the textbooks on personal property law, as well as in textbooks concerned with the rules of law which govern the processes of following, tracing and claiming. It will, however, be argued that the better view is that this orthodox descriptive account of the law is mistaken …
€ (Westlaw)
Alexander Waghorn, ‘Specificatio’s raw materials’ (2024) 140 Law Quarterly Review (Jan) 85-105.
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