Andrew Tettenborn

Reversionary Damage to Chattels

To the annoyance of students and academics alike, the law of tort contains a number of awkward heads of liability which defy classification except under “Miscellaneous” or some similar rubric. This article explores one such: the action on the case for damage to the plaintiffs reversionary interest in a chattel. This oddly obscure head, of liability does not even have a generally-accepted name (in this article it is christened, for brevity, “reversionary damage”). It is traditionally dismissed by the text-books in a paragraph or two; the leading cases on it are rarely cited; and yet in practice it is a highly important aspect of the law of personal property without which the owners protection would be seriously incomplete.

ENGLISH PUBLIC POLICY INTERNATIONALISED—AND CONVERSION CLARIFIED TOO

Apart from the more high-profile questions of public and private international law noted above, Kuwait Airways also raised some nice issues about the often enigmatic English tort of conversion.

Covenants, Privity of Contract, and the Purchaser of Personal Property

This article discusses an old but vexed question in the law of obligations: to what extent can a purchaser of personal property find himself bound to observe covenants relating to that property to which he was not party? Put shortly, how far can covenants bind personal property? This question can, of course, arise in many guises. The issue may be whether a purchaser of shares in a private company is bound by a right of pre-emption in respect of those shares held by other shareholders in the same company; whether the seller of goods can impose restrictions on the price at which remote purchasers may resell those goods; whether the mortgagee of a ship can be prevented from using the vessel inconsistently with the rights of one who has booked space in her: issues whose sheer diversity makes it most difficult to achieve the aim in this article of developing general principles in this area of the law.