Chapter IV. On The Modes Of Acquiring Dominion

39. Preliminary Note. A mode of acquiring dominion is understood as the title upon which the acquisition of some thing is founded. Many authors distinguish original and derivative modes of acquisition. Those modes are called original according to which, at the first, the division of common goods or private dominion arose; but derivative modes are judged to be those according to which, after the division of goods has already been made, dominion of some thing is derived from one owner to another. In our regions, where there no longer exist things which have never been under private dominion, original modes of acquiring dominion are rarely given. In other regions not yet inhabited there are still lands and things which have never been under private dominion. There, therefore, an original mode of taking dominion can have place. For the most part in our times the consent of the civil government is required in those regions.

The modes of taking dominion are founded either in law (natural or positive), and then they are suitably called legal modes; or upon an agreement entered among men, and then they are called conventional modes. The conventional modes of acquiring and transferring dominion are the manifold contracts; these modes indeed are most frequent, whence below contracts must be treated especially. To those conventional modes of acquiring dominion, hereditary succession also is reduced at least in some way. But legal modes are generally distinguished as four: occupation, finding, accession, prescription; whence these four must be treated one by one.¹

Also to be noted is a certain distinction of goods which often occurs in modern civil codes; namely, vacant goods, derelict goods, and lost goods are distinguished:

Vacant goods are called those whose owner has died or disappeared, no heir or successor having been left and no testament having been made;² sometimes they are taken more broadly for those goods which have never had an owner, as pearls in the sea.

Derelict goods are called those which have been left by the owner without the intention of recovering them, for example fruits, nuts, grapes, ears of grain, which remained after the harvest had already been completed.

Finally, lost goods are those which even now actually have an owner, who nevertheless is unknown, for example a lost gold ring.

¹ Some authors, especially modern ones, enumerate labor also among the modes of acquiring dominion; but labor seems better to be reduced either to contracts, if namely it is concerned with another's thing, or to industrial or mixed accession, if it is concerned with one's own thing.

² Cf. Cod. Iustin. X, 10.