The Good-Faith Purchase Doctrine in 247 Jurisdictions

Abstract

Abstract Scholars have argued that reasonable persons can disagree on what the most sensible good-faith purchase doctrine is. Indeed, using hand-coded data on this doctrine in 247 jurisdictions, this article finds that this doctrine has hardly converged-there are at least 23 different variants of this doctrine, from “no good faith required” to “good faith is all the purchaser needs.” The 23 variants can be grouped into three clusters: the categorical approach, under which stolen goods always revert back to original owners; the binary approach, under which the distinction between stolen and non-stolen goods matters, but stolen goods do not always revert; and the unitary approach, under which there is no distinction between stolen and non-stolen goods.