Question Five: On the Acquisition of Right and Dominion

201. State of the question. - In the present question, as is clear, the matter treated is dominion over goods distinct from man himself, which are either the effects of his faculties and operations, or the external goods of fortune. But the mode of acquiring dominion is diverse according to the title. A title is a cause apt of itself to confer dominion: it consists in some fact furnished with the authority of law, by which a thing is acquired; for from law it has that it is a title of dominion, since every right arises from some law.

Some modes are primitive or original (porspronkelijke), by which, at the origin of the human race, the first dominions were acquired and according to which the first division of things was made, when as yet nothing was possessed: these are production (or labor), as to the fruits of human intellectual and bodily operations, and occupation, which includes some labor, as to external goods;¹ all other modes are derived (afgeleide) from these, which they suppose, whether they be legal, because they arise either from natural law and from the nature of things, as invention and often accession, or from positive law, as prescription; or whether they be conventional, from the free convention of men, as succession and contract.

¹ Thus also Pius XI, in the encyclical Quadragesimo anno, May 15, 1931, II, 1 at the end.

But in our times, because there is no longer question of the first acquisition of things, primitive or original modes are called those by which right and dominion are acquired simply, namely, a thing of no one which never had an owner or at least actually does not have one or has ceased to have one: these are principally occupation and labor, to which are connected, from the nature of the thing, invention and accession, and from civil law, prescription. But derivative modes are called those by which dominion is transferred, namely, a thing which is under some dominion and the right to it is transmitted to another, and the dominion of some thing is derived from one to another: these are succession and contract.

Concerning the mode of acquiring dominion in the effects and fruits of intellectual and bodily labor nothing special occurs to be said; hence we must treat only of the modes of acquiring dominion in external things. But the derivative modes are considered in the third section of the third part of the treatise, where contracts are treated; hence we shall speak only of the primitive modes, namely: 1) of occupation (toeeigening); 2) of invention (pntdekking); 3) of accession (aanwas of natrekking); 4) of prescription (veraring). But labor is reduced to one of the preceding: when it is occupied about one's own thing, to the right of accession; if about another's thing, it is referred to contract; if about a thing of no one, it presupposes occupation and is included in it.

202. Diverse things to be acquired are distinguished:

1. vacant things² (onbeheerde goederen), which have never had an owner, whether they are animate, as wild animals in the woods, or inanimate, as a jewel at the bottom of the sea;

² Thus Noldin, Van Roey, Prummer, etc. Entirely conformably to French law, art. 539 C.C., which distinguishes between vacant goods and things of no one - and abandoned successions or goods of the deceased without an heir. On the contrary, others call only these latter goods vacant.

2. abandoned things (verlaten goederen), which have had an owner, but actually do not have one, because the owner in some way has abdicated actual detention of the thing from himself, as treasures formerly hidden, fruits which are left after the harvest has been completed, goods of a deceased man who did not institute an heir or which the heirs have renounced;

3. lost or mislaid things (verloren goederen), which even actually have an owner, but one unknown or uncertain, because, against the will of the owner, they have fallen out of his possession, as a gold ring found in the street.