Conversion legal definition of conversion: "conversion"
Conversion
Any unauthorized act that deprives an owner of personal property without his or her consent.
The wrongdoer converts the goods to
his or
her own use and excludes the owner from use andenjoyment of
them. The English Common Law early recognized such an
act as
wrongful and, by
the middle of
the fifteenth century, allowed an
action in
Trover to
compensate the aggrieved owner. The earliest cases allowing a
lawsuit for conversion were based on
claims that the plaintiff had possession of
certain items of
Personal Property,
then casually lost them, and the defendant had found them and had not returned them but instead "converted them to
his own use." This phrase was picked up,and it
gave a
name to a
tort that originally was a
kind of
Action on the Case, a
form of
Trespass. As
time passed, the plea that the plaintiff had lost his or
her goods and the defendant had found them cameto be
considered a
legal fiction (that is, a
decision was made in
the case as if
the plea were true, and it
did not have to be
proved). The defendant was not allowed to
dispute the allegations but could answer only the claim that the plaintiff had a
right to
possession of
the goods and the defendant had refused to
restore them to
the plaintiff. The former offence of fraudulent conversion was replaced by an offence of
theft, contrary to section 1(1) of the
Theft Act 1968, from which it slightly differs.
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Notes and references[edit]
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