ABSTRACT

Some academic legal writers subscribe to the view that the concept of bailment contributes to the

intelligibility or rationality of English personal property law. Bailment is said to straddle the domains

of obligations and property. The purpose of this chapter is to enquire whether English law does in

fact benefit from having an overarching concept of bailment as a tool for regulating diverse fact

situations occupying a broad spectrum, embracing at one extreme the honest finder of goods, to

multi-million pound aircraft finance leases at the other. The argument is that the alleged concept of

bailment does more harm than good, stultifying the development of a rational law of personal

property. The supposed concept of bailment is too elusive or too over-inclusive in its scope to be

of any normative significance. Indeed, where legal conclusions have been derived from the

deployment of the concept they usually turn out to be unsound. Furthermore, sometimes the label

of bailment acts as an unnecessary straitjacket, confining principles of potentially broad application

to the particular context of chattels. Another insidious tendency of the current attachment to

bailment reasoning is to downplay the deliberate contractual structuring of relationships between

commercial parties. Overall it will be argued that the category of bailment has no autonomous legal

content which cannot be better attributed to concepts of consent, wrongdoing, unjust enrichment

or property.