Personal Property - Definition - Law Dictionary Home Dictionary Definition personal-property

Definition :

Personal property, money, goods, cattle, chattels, stocks, shares, securities, debts, etc., and also leases for years, however long. Personal property is either in possession, or in action, where a man has not the actual occupation of the thing, but only a right to it arising upon some contract, and recoverable by an action at law.Any person may assign personal property, including chattels real, directly to himself and another person or other persons or corporation, by the like means as he might assign the same to another, Law of Property Amendment Act, 1859, s. 21.

This was extended by the (English) Emergency Act, 1881, to conveyances of freehold land or choses in action by a husband to a wife or e contra. Now, by the (English) Law of Property Act, 1925, s. 72, a person may convey real or personal property to himself alone.

In the case of real property there can be no such thing as an absolute ownership in the subject-matter, i.e., land; the utmost that any one, even an owner in fee simple, can have is an estate. But in the case of personal property the primary rule is precisely the reverse; such property is essentially the subject of absolute ownership and cannot be held for any estate (Williamns on Pers. Prop.). This strict rule of the law, however, was not recognised inequity, and accordingly under a gift of personal property to A. for life and after his decease to B., the Court of Chancery, to carry out the obvious intention, would hold that A. was entitled to a life interest merely, and that B. had during the life of A. a vested interest in remainder of which he could dispose at his pleasure; and if the property consisted of moveable goods, A. could be compelled to furnish and sign an inventory of them and an undertaking to take proper care of them. See Re Swan, (1915) 1 Ch 829. The only exception was in the case of goods qu' ipso usu consumuntur, e.g., wines and household provisions, for in these a person to whom they are given for life takes the absolute interest. The proper and usual mode of creating limited interests in personal property is by means of the doctrine of trusts, i.e., by vesting the property absolutely in trustees and declaring that they shall hold it upon trust for the proposed beneficiaries either for life or otherwise as may be agreed. But even inequity personalty which has settled either by deed or will to follow the trusts of an equitable entailed estate inland vested absolutely in the first tenant in tail at his birth. See Re Lord Chesham, (1909) 2 Ch 310. Joint tenancy and tenancy in common may subsist in the case of personal property, though now tenancy in common of any legal estate in land, including leaseholds or other interests in land, has been abolished [(English) (Law of Property Act, 1925,

s. 1]; of the latter kind of property almost every marriage settlement affords and instance. The policy of the land and property legislation of 1925 being to assimilate the law of real and personal property as much as possible, the Law of Property Act, 1925, provides (s. 130) that personal property may be entailed like real estate, but only (in either case) by way of equitable interest (see TAIL). Before the (English) Land Transfer Act, 1897, a notable distinction between realty and personalty was that realty devolved directly on the heir or devisee upon the death of a person seised of the estate or inheritance. After that Act it devolved upon the personal representative in trust for the heir or devisee, and after the Administration of Estates Act, 1925, it devolved, as personal property and chattels real had always devolved, upon the personal representative, whose conveyance or assent is necessary and sufficient to confer title.