ABSTRACT
Section 61(1) defines ‘delivery’ as a voluntary transfer of possession. The legal possession does not necessarily mean physical possession. Although the concept of legal possession has given rise to much academic debate, for our purposes ‘possession’ may be regarded as an intention to possess coupled with the right to possess. Thus when you leave home to go shopping, although you do not take your personal possessions with you, you still possess them in law. A complication which needs to be borne in mind is that one party may have physical possession of goods, for example a warehouseman (that is, a person whose business it is to provide storage facilities for other people’s goods), while another, the owner, has legal possession. The legal possession will normally override the physical possession so that if the owner instructs the warehouseman to give physical possession of the goods to the owner’s nominee (for example, the owner’s employee or a person to whom the owner has resold the goods), the warehouseman must comply.
