Finders, keepers, sometimes extended as the children's rhyme finders, keepers; losers, weepers, is an
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
adage
An adage (; Latin: adagium) is a memorable and usually philosophical aphorism that communicates an important truth derived from experience, custom, or both, and that many people consider true and credible because of its longeval tradition, i.e. ...
with the premise that when something is unowned or abandoned, whoever finds it first can claim it for themself permanently. The phrase relates to an
ancient Roman
In modern historiography, ancient Rome refers to Roman civilisation from the founding of the city of Rome in the 8th century BC to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. It encompasses the Roman Kingdom (753–509 BC ...
law
Law is a set of rules that are created and are enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior,Robertson, ''Crimes against humanity'', 90. with its precise definition a matter of longstanding debate. It has been vario ...
of similar meaning and has been expressed in various ways over the centuries. The 1982 English
Court of Appeal
A court of appeals, also called a court of appeal, appellate court, appeal court, court of second instance or second instance court, is any court of law that is empowered to hear an appeal of a trial court or other lower tribunal. In much of t ...
case ''
Parker v British Airways Board
''Parker v British Airways Board'' 9821 QB 1004 is an English property law case ordered by the Court of Appeal.
Facts
A passenger named Parker found a gold bracelet on the floor of an executive lounge at Heathrow airport. He handed it to the o ...
'' expanded the phrase, with the judgement of
Donaldson L.J. declaring "Finders keepers, unless the true owner claims the article".
[Parker v British Airways Board (1982) 1 All ER 834](_blank)
/ref> Difficulties arise when exploring how best to define when exactly something is unowned or abandoned, which can lead to legal or ethical disputes, especially as jurisdictions
Jurisdiction (from Latin 'law' + 'declaration') is the legal term for the legal authority granted to a legal entity to enact justice. In federations like the United States, areas of jurisdiction apply to local, state, and federal levels.
Jur ...
often differ in their approach.
Application
*One of the most common uses of "Finders, Keepers" involves shipwreck
A shipwreck is the wreckage of a ship that is located either beached on land or sunken to the bottom of a body of water. Shipwrecking may be intentional or unintentional. Angela Croome reported in January 1999 that there were approximately ...
s. Under international maritime law
Admiralty law or maritime law is a body of law that governs nautical issues and private maritime disputes. Admiralty law consists of both domestic law on maritime activities, and private international law governing the relationships between priva ...
, for shipwrecks of a certain age, the original owner may have lost all claim to the cargo. Anyone who finds the wreck can then file a salvage claim on it and place a lien on the vessel, and subsequently mount a salvage operation.
*Philosophies, such as anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism (or, colloquially, ancap) is an anti-statist, libertarian, and anti-political philosophy and economic theory that seeks to abolish centralized states in favor of stateless societies with systems of private property enforce ...
, that advocate a right to own land and other natural resources often appeal to the doctrine of finders keepers in the case of claiming ownership of what was previously unowned (see Terra nullius
''Terra nullius'' (, plural ''terrae nullius'') is a Latin expression meaning " nobody's land".
It was a principle sometimes used in international law to justify claims that territory may be acquired by a state's occupation of it.
:
:
...
).
*In the United States, the Homestead Act
The Homestead Acts were several laws in the United States by which an applicant could acquire ownership of government land or the public domain, typically called a homestead. In all, more than of public land, or nearly 10 percent of th ...
allowed people to claim land as their own as long as it was originally unowned and the property was then developed by the claimant.
* In the field of social simulation
Social simulation is a research field that applies computational methods to study issues in the social sciences. The issues explored include problems in computational law, psychology, organizational behavior, sociology, political science, econom ...
, Rosaria Conte
Rosaria Conte (14 April 1954 in Rome – 5 July 2016 in Rome) was an Italian social scientist. She was the head of the Laboratory of Agent Based Social Simulation at the ISTC- CNR in Rome, which hosts an interdisciplinary research group working at ...
and Cristiano Castelfranchi
Cristiano Castelfranchi (born 1944 in Rome) is an Associate Researcher at the Institute of Psychology of the Italian National Research Council. He teaches Cognitive Psychology and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Siena. In 2003, he w ...
have used "finders, keepers" as a case study for simulating the evolution of norms in simple societies.Nicole J. Saam and Andreas Harrer: Simulating Norms, Social Inequality, and Functional Change in Artificial Societies
/ref>
See also
* Homestead principle
The homestead principle is the principle by which one gains ownership of an unowned natural resource by performing an act of original appropriation. Appropriation could be enacted by putting an unowned resource to active use (as with using it ...
* Bailment
Bailment is a legal relationship in common law, where the owner transfers physical Possession (law), possession of personal property ("chattel") for a time, but retains ownership. The owner who surrenders custody to a property is called the "ba ...
* Lost, mislaid, and abandoned property
Lost, mislaid, and abandoned property are categories of the common law of property which deals with personal property or chattel which has left the possession of its rightful owner without having directly entered the possession of another person. ...
* Adverse possession
Adverse possession, sometimes colloquially described as "squatter's rights", is a legal principle in the Common law, Anglo-American common law under which a person who does not have title (property), legal title to a piece of property—usuall ...
("possession is nine-tenths of the law
Possession is nine-tenths of the law is an expression meaning that ownership is easier to maintain if one has possession of something, or difficult to enforce if one does not. The expression is also stated as "possession is ten points of the law", ...
")
* Uti possidetis
''Uti possidetis'' is an expression that originated in Roman private law, where it was the name of a procedure used in litigation about land. It came from a praetorial edict that could be abbreviated "As you possess, so shall you possess". La ...
* ''Usucapio ''Usucapio'' was a concept in Roman law that dealt with the acquisition of ownership of something through possession. It was subsequently developed as a principle of civil law systems, usucaption. It is similar to the common law concept of adverse p ...
''/Usucaption
Usucaption ( la, usucapio), also known as ''acquisitive prescription'', is a concept found in civil law systems and has its origin in the Roman law of property.
Usucaption is a method by which ownership of property (i.e. title to the property) c ...
* Theft by finding
Theft by finding occurs when someone chances upon an object which seems abandoned and takes possession of the object but fails to take steps to establish whether the object is genuinely abandoned and not merely lost or unattended. In some jurisdi ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Finders, Keepers
Property law
Legal idioms