The Scope of Conversion: Property and Contract

Abstract

The article asks whether the tort of conversion should be expanded so as to protect contractual rights. The suggestion, found in recent case law and academic texts, that conversion should protect contractual rights because such rights belong to the law of property is rejected. It is argued that this approach is purely semantic and ignores the fact that contractual rights have different characteristics to other kinds of rights that we typically class as ‘property rights’. The better approach, it is argued, is to ask whether it is actually possible to protect contractual rights through the tort of conversion. The article attempts to show that the absence of certain features from contractual rights, in particular the fact that such rights do not relate to a physical object and are not exigible against the world, makes the expansion of conversion extremely difficult.