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.