I just watched the Sherlock Holmes episode The Blue Carbuncle. In that
episode a guy steals a big jewel (The Blue Carbuncle) and then puts it
into the mouth of a goose. The goose swallows it and then someone else
buys the goose. That goose is then lost and a police officer picks up
the goose and gives it to Sherlock Holmes.

The jewel is found when they eat the goose and ultimately Sherlock
Holmes keeps the jewel.

I am curious what the legal rules of finders keepers are. If something
is stolen and then the thief drops it in the street then someone picks
it up, what is the legal status of ownership?

Does the original owner keep a claim on it forever? In this story,
would Sherlock be in legal trouble if it was found that he didn't
contact the owner when he found it?

---

Request for Question Clarification by tutuzdad-ga on 10 Mar 2006 06:56 PST

The answer depends on when (year) and where (in the world) the
"finding" part of the incident occured.

tutuzdad-ga

This will depend on the law of your particular country, which you
don't say. But in Britain there is no law of "finders keepers".
Anybody finding something  apparently lost or abandoned should make
efforts to trace, and return it to, the owner, usually by handing it
to the police or, for example, to the lost property office of a
railway company. If the goods are not claimed within a certain period
(often two months} the police may offer them to the finder; but the
legal owner retains the right to their ownership for one year from
their loss. Anyone not handing in lost goods risks being convicted of
"theft by finding". I don't know if this was the law in Sherlock
Holmes's time; but I would guess broadly speaking it was.

Greetings,

These sites help explain that the matter is not quite as simple as the
children's rhyme would have it be.  The third site brings the
discussion to different level.

http://besr.org/ethicist/lostobjects.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost%2C_mislaid%2C_and_abandoned_property
http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/research_collections/research/history/hisfind.html

However, the rhyme relates to the adage: "Possession is nine tenths of the law."

This relates to the problem of the true owner to prove ownership. 
The answer and comments to this question may be of interest to you:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=496059

I am no lawyer, but it seems to me that the policeman should have
tried to find the owner of the goose and thus was at fault.  Unless he
told Sherlock that he had simply found the loose goose  - letting him
know that it was not the policeman's property -  then Sherlock could
consider himself to be owner in good faith on the assumption that the
policeman was the legal owner of the goose.
But it may go a step further:  If Sherlock knew whom the blue
carbuncle belonged to and that it had been stolen, he could no longer
consider himself owner in good faith and should have tried to return
it to the rightful owner.

The actual story by Doyle is a bit different. The policeman's family
eats the bird, finding the stone, which Sherlock knows has been stolen
and has a 1000 pd reward for returning.  The policeman leaves the
stone with Sherlock.  The rest of the story is his discovering how the
stone got in the bird.
I think that we can assume that he later returned it and claimed the reward.

it belongs to the person it was stolen from.  provided he can prove it was his

suppose i lost a winning lottery ticket and you found it.  if i could
prove it was my ticket i could sue you might share in the prize if it
was solid evidence.

now if i'd thrown out the ticket, and you found it, i wouldn't have a
leg to stand on.  it's been abandoned.

but in your case the rightful owner never abandoned his property.  it
was stolen and still rightfully his.