English law is the common law legal system of England and Wales, comprising mainly criminal law and civil law, each branch having its own courts and procedures.
A tort, in common law jurisdictions, is a civil wrong that causes a claimant to suffer loss or harm resulting in legal liability for the person who commits the tortious act. It can include the intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligence, financial losses, injuries, invasion of privacy, and many other things.
Conversion is an intentional tort consisting of "taking with the intent of exercising over the chattel an ownership inconsistent with the real owner's right of possession". In the United Kingdom, it is a tort of strict liability. Its equivalents in criminal law include larceny or theft and criminal conversion. In those jurisdictions that recognise it, criminal conversion is a lesser crime than theft/larceny.
The owner of two horses had come on board a ferry from Birkenhead to Liverpool. The ferryman refused to carry the horses. The owner refused to take them back on shore, and so the ferryman took the bridle from the owner turned the horses loose at the landing. The owner stayed put on board, and did not try to get the horses back. He sued the ferryman for conversion.
Birkenhead is a town within the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral in Merseyside, England. Historically in Cheshire, it is on the Wirral Peninsula, along the west bank of the River Mersey, opposite the city of Liverpool. In the 2011 census, the Parliamentary constituency of Birkenhead had a population of 88,818.
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough in North West England, with an estimated population of 491,500. Its metropolitan area is the fifth-largest in the UK, with a population of 2.24 million in 2011. The local authority is Liverpool City Council, the most populous local government district in the metropolitan county of Merseyside and the largest in the Liverpool City Region.
A bridle is a piece of equipment used to direct a horse. As defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, the "bridle" includes both the headstall that holds a bit that goes in the mouth of a horse, and the reins that are attached to the bit.
The judge at the trial told the jury that the defendant ferryman, by taking the horses from the plaintiff and turning them out of the vessel, had been guilty of a conversion. The ferryman appealed.
The Exchequer Court held that the ferryman was not guilty of conversion, because there was no interference with the plaintiff's "general right of dominion" over the horses. “In my opinion,” said Lord Abinger CJ,
“he should have added to his direction, that it was for them to consider what was the intention of the defendant in so doing. It is a proposition familiar to all lawyers, that a simple asportation of a chattel, without any intention of making any further use of it, although it may be a sufficient foundation for an action of trespass, is not sufficient to establish a conversion. It has never yet been held that the single act of removal of a chattel, independent of any claim over it, either in favour of the party himself or any one else, amounts to a conversion of the chattel.”
Rolfe B gave a now well recognised definition of conversion that it is,
"a taking with the intent of exercising over the chattel an ownership inconsistent with the real owner's right of possession".
Trespass is an area of criminal law or tort law broadly divided into three groups: trespass to the person, trespass to chattels and trespass to land.
This article addresses torts in United States law. As such, it covers primarily common law. Moreover, it provides general rules, as individual states all have separate civil codes. There are three general categories of torts: intentional torts, negligence, and strict liability torts.
Trespass to chattels is a tort whereby the infringing party has intentionally interfered with another person's lawful possession of a chattel. The interference can be any physical contact with the chattel in a quantifiable way, or any dispossession of the chattel. As opposed to the greater wrong of conversion, trespass to chattels is argued to be actionable per se.
Replevin or claim and delivery is a legal remedy which enables a person to recover personal property taken wrongfully or unlawfully, pending a final determination by a court of law, and to obtain compensation for resulting losses.
In tort law, detinue is an action to recover for the wrongful taking of personal property. It is initiated by an individual who claims to have a greater right to their immediate possession than the current possessor. For an action in detinue to succeed, a claimant must first prove that he had better right to possession of the chattel than the defendant and second that the defendant refused to return the chattel once demanded by the claimant.
Trover is a form of lawsuit in common-law countries for recovery of damages for wrongful taking of personal property. Trover belongs to a series of remedies for such wrongful taking, its distinctive feature being recovery only for the value of whatever was taken, not for the recovery of the property itself.
In the law of tort, property, and criminal law a trespasser is a person who commits the act of trespassing on a property, that is, without the permission of the owner. Being present on land as a trespasser thereto creates liability in the trespasser, so long as the trespass is intentional. At the same time, the status of a visitor as a trespasser defines the legal rights of the visitor if they are injured due to the negligence of the property owner.
An intentional tort is a category of torts that describes a civil wrong resulting from an intentional act on the part of the tortfeasor. The term negligence, on the other hand, pertains to a tort that simply results from the failure of the tortfeasor to take sufficient care in fulfilling a duty owed, while strict liability torts refers to situations where a party is liable for injuries no matter what precautions were taken.
Tortious interference, also known as intentional interference with contractual relations, in the common law of torts, occurs when one person intentionally damages someone else's contractual or business relationships with a third party causing economic harm. As an example, someone could use blackmail to induce a contractor into breaking a contract, or they could obstruct someone's ability to honor a contract with a client by deliberately refusing to deliver necessary goods.
In tort common law, the defense of necessity gives the state or an individual a privilege to take or use the property of another. A defendant typically invokes the defense of necessity only against the intentional torts of trespass to chattels, trespass to land, or conversion. The Latin phrase from common law is necessitas inducit privilegium quod jura privata. A court will grant this privilege to a trespasser when the risk of harm to an individual or society is apparently and reasonably greater than the harm to the property. Unlike the privilege of self-defense, those who are harmed by individuals invoking the necessity privilege are usually free from any wrongdoing. Generally, an individual invoking this privilege is obligated to pay any actual damages caused in the use of the property but not punitive or nominal damages.
Volenti non fit iniuria is a common law doctrine which states that if someone willingly places themselves in a position where harm might result, knowing that some degree of harm might result, they are not able to bring a claim against the other party in tort or delict. Volenti applies only to the risk which a reasonable person would consider them as having assumed by their actions; thus a boxer consents to being hit, and to the injuries that might be expected from being hit, but does not consent to his opponent striking him with an iron bar, or punching him outside the usual terms of boxing. Volenti is also known as a "voluntary assumption of risk."
Trespassvi et armis was a kind of lawsuit at common law called a tort. The cause of action alleged a trespass upon person or property vi et armis, Latin for "by force and arms." The plaintiff would allege in a pleading that the act committing the offense was "immediately injurious to another's property, and therefore necessarily accompanied by some degree of force; and by special action on the case, where the act is in itself indifferent and the injury only consequential, and therefore arising without any breach of the peace." Thus it was "immaterial whether the injury was committed willfully or not."
Letang v Cooper[1964] EWCA Civ 5 is an English Court of Appeal judgment, by which it was decided that negligently caused personal injury cannot be recovered under the trespass to the person, but the tort of negligence must be tried instead.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and introduction to tort law:
Thomas Haslem v. William A. Lockwood, Connecticut, (1871) is an important United States case in property, tort, conversion, trover and nuisance law.
Trespass in English law is an area of tort law broadly divided into three groups: trespass to the person, trespass to goods and trespass to land.
Cooper v Wakley (1828) 172 ER 507 is an English tort law case, concerning the libel by the editor of The Lancet.
School of Visual Arts v. Diane Kuprewicz, 771 N.Y.S.2d 804 (2003), is a New York Supreme Court case in which it was held that sending and/or directing "large volumes of unsolicited job applications and pornographic e-mails" by defendant to plaintiff if it depletes hard disk space, drains processing power, and negatively impact other system resources of the plaintiff is sufficient to establish "a cause of action for trespass to chattels." The ruling has been followed and cited in a number of cases in different jurisdictions.
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