The appellant contended that title to the car passed to him by virtue of the exception to the nemo dat rule encapsulated in s. 9 of the Factors Act 1889. The general rule is that no one can sell what he does not own. The exception in s. 9 in effect provides that, when a person who has agreed to buy goods acquires possession of them with the consent of the seller, any further disposition of them by him is as effective as if authorized by the owner. Hence, Mr Jones was able to argue that the sale to him was as if authorized by Ms Hopkins herself, albeit she was the innocent victim of a thief and had no way of knowing the whereabouts of her car.

This problem had been anticipated by academic writers in the early 1960s.2 A result favouring the bona fide purchaser so shocked their sensibilities3 that they felt able to reject it without any reasoned explanation of why the words of s. 9 should not be given their apparently obvious, certainly literal, meaning. This academic