This book analyses the question of how legal ownership in tangible movable property – goods and corporeal money – is transferred from one person to another and of how certain kinds of defects, particularly mistakes, affect the passage of legal title in that regard. Take the simple case that A, the beneficial legal owner of a car, transfers that car to B – for example by way of sale, barter or gift – and that A is in some manner mistaken about certain facts relevant to the transaction. A might, for example, wrongly believe that there is a contract between him and B, or that the relevant contract is valid, or he might believe that B is in fact someone else. In such cases, a broad variety of issues may arise. This book's scope, however, is limited to the question of whether and in what circumstances legal ownership passes to B or whether it remains vested in A. We shall not – or only peripherally – deal with the question of whether A might claim the transferred property's value from B by a personal restitutionary claim or whether A might assert equitable property rights by way of proprietary restitution (for example under a constructive or a resulting trust). We shall neither consider whether A might – once legal ownership has passed to B – revest property (legal or equitable) by way of rescission. Our analysis furthermore presupposes that the very asset transferred from A to B might still be found in B's hands in an unchanged form. We shall not insofar deal with questions of mixture or tracing (i.e. whether A might assert rights in relation to mixtures or traceable substitutes of the asset transferred to B) or following (i.e. whether A might assert rights against third-party recipients of the transferred asset).

Though this area of the law may well be regarded as a core area of private law, it has not yet received much attention in academic literature. It is the object of this book to set out the current state of the law and to offer – based on the existing case law – a coherent and rationalised explanation of how legal ownership is transferred from one person to another and of how mistakes and other defects operate in that regard.