The Court holds for Plaintiff-Landowner. What is its reasoning? (p.127-128):
The plaintiffs are the freeholders of the locus in quo, and as such they have the right to forbid anybody coming on their land or in any way interfering with it. They had the right to say that their pool should be cleaned out in any way that they thought fit, and to direct what should be done with anything found in the pool in the course of such cleaning out. It is no doubt right, as the counsel for the defendant contended, to say that the plaintiffs must show that they had actual control over the locus in quo and the things in it; but under the circumstances, can it be said that the Minster Pool and whatever might be in that pool were not under the control of the plaintiffs? In my opinion, they were. The case is like the case, of which several illustrations were put in the course of the argument, where an article is found on private property, although the owners of that property are ignorant that it is there. The principle on which this case must be decided, and the distinction which must be drawn between this case and that of Bridges v. Hawkesworth, 21 L.J. (Q.B.) 75, is to be found in a passage in Pollock and Wright’s Essay on Possession in the Common Law, p. 41: “The possession of land carries with it in general, by our law, possession of everything which is attached to or under that land, and, in the absence of a better title elsewhere, the right to possess it also. And it makes no difference that the possessor is not aware of the thing’s existence. It is free to any one who requires a specific intention as a part of a de facto possession to treat this as a positive rule of law. But it seems preferable to say that the legal possession rests on a real de facto possession constituted by the occupier’s general power and intent to exclude unauthorized interference.”
But what about Bridges v. Hawkesworth. Does the Court overrule Bridges? Page 128:
The case of Bridges v. Hawkesworth stands by itself, and on special grounds; and on those grounds it seems to me that the decision in that case was right. Some one had accidentally dropped a bundle of bank notes in a public shop. The shopkeeper did not know they had been dropped, and did not in any sense exercise control over them. The shop was open to the public, and they were invited to come there. A customer picked up the notes and gave them to the shopkeeper in order that he might advertise them. The owner of the notes was not found, and the finder then sought to recover them from the shopkeeper. It was held that he was entitled to do so, the ground of the decision being, as was pointed out by Patteson, J., that the notes, being dropped in the public part of the shop, were never in the custody of the shopkeeper, or “within the protection of his house.”
Are you persuaded by this reasoning?
Isn’t a shopkeeper also in possession of his shop and doesn’t he also have the right to control what his invitees are allowed to do on his property? Private property is still private property even if you invite the public to come over to shop.
