Odger's English Common Law

456 TRESPASS TO GOODS, DETINUE AND CONVERSION.
consent. Here at once a second cause of action arises—viz.,
an action of detinue. For, in addition to the insulting invasion
of his right of possession, A. is now deprived of the use and
enjoyment of the goods to which he is entitled. In the case
of household furniture, for instance, it may be that he has no
longer a table to sit at or a chair to sit on ; in the case of
wares and merchandise, his business will no doubt be injured
by this sudden and unlawful reduction of his stock-in-trade.
The amount of damages which B. must pay for this detention
will, of course, depend on the length of time for which he
withholds them from A.
But all this time the goods remain the property of the true
owner. B.'s unlawful acts in no way affect the title to the
goods. If A. be the owner of the goods, he cannot so far
claim to be paid the value of them by B. ; for, as we shall
see, he is entitled to have them returned to him. But we
will now suppose that B. does some further wrongful act
which amounts to an assertion of ownership in himself : as,
for instance, if he sells them to an innocent purchaser
in market overt or wantonly destroys them. He has
now permanently deprived A. of the use and enjoyment of
the goods ; he has deprived A. of his whole interest in them.
He has also deprived the true owner, if he be other than A.,
of his property in the goods. B. is therefore liable for the
full value of the goods, whether he acted in good faith in
ignorance of the true owner's title or not; and A. can
recover the full value of the goods, even though his interest
in them be a limited or partial one. The wrong-doer cannot
set up that A. had only a partial interest, though if A.
recovers the whole value he may have to account to the
owner for the value of the latter's interest in the goods. 1
Here, then, we have a third cause of action in A., which is
called an action of conversion.
Now let us suppose that B., instead of destroying the
goods, sells them to C, an innocent purchaser for value, but
not in market overt, and that C. had no reason to suppose
that B. was not the true owner of them. No property in the
i The WinhfieU, [1902] P. 42.