Finders Keepers
When author Virginia M. Bolen found a watch in the parking lot of the shelter in which she volunteered in August of 1997, she had no idea the trouble that would follow. In Finders Keepers, she shares her story of being arrested and charged with felony theft in a small town in Montana. This accounts narrates Bolens encounter with a justice system run amuck. She describes what happened to her and how she fought back over a period of years to gain vindication. She was harassed, intimidated, jailed, and pilloried in the press for a crime that law enforcement knew she didnt commit. Through her own words, public records, correspondence, and newspaper articles, she portrays the personalities involved, including jail inmates (even the girlfriend of a serial killer), sheriffs deputies, county attorneys, bridge players, the mother of a world champion poker player, and a Montana State Senator. Finders Keepers gives insight into the personalities and mindset of authorities, who ignoring facts and common sense, persist in yielding their power. Its a case thats been followed by the legal community, even outside of Montana, because of its challenge to prosecutorial immunity.
Property and the Law of Finders
Are finders keepers? This most simple of questions has long evaded a satisfactory legal answer. Generally it seems to have been accepted that a finder acquires a property right in the object of her find and can protect it from subsequent interference, but even this turns out to be the baldest statement of principle, resting on obscure and confused authority. This first full-length treatment of finders sets them in their legal-historical context, and discovers a fascinating area of law lying at the crossroads of crime, obligations, and property. That on the same facts a finder might be thief, bailee, and/or property right holder has clouded our conceptual analysis, and prevented us from stating simply our rules about finding. Nonetheless, when the applicable doctrines and policies of our property law (particularly the central concept of possession) are explored and understood in the light of countervailing rules of crime and tort, we can argue confidently that, despite centuries of doubt and confusion, English law has succeeded in producing a body of law that is theoretically and practically coherent. Property and the Law of Finders makes this argument, and will appeal to anyone specifically interested in the law of personal property, and also to those with broader concerns about the evolution of common law concepts and their ability to yield workable, practical solutions.
