Legal Incidents of Ownership

Q. What are legal incidents of ownership?  [10 marks - 2022]

Legal Incidents of Ownership

Legal incidents of ownership are the rights or benefits a person retains over property. For example, if someone gives away a property but keeps the right to receive rent, they retain an incident of ownership. 

The incidents are 

(i) right to possess the thing though he may be wrongfully deprived of it or may have voluntarily divested himself of it. 

(ii) right to use and enjoy the thing owned, right to manage and use, to the income from it such right to possess being in fact liberties. 

(iii) right to consume or destroy as also to alienate or transfer the thing by will after death or by conveyance during lifetime. 

(iv) right of ownership being indeterminate in duration such interest being perpetual, determined neither by any set point (as the interest of a lessee or bailee) nor by owner’s death, as the property owned can descend to his heirs or while the new owner’s interest is to continue, if the property is sold to him prior to death, unaffected by such death; and 

(v) ownership is residuary in character and when the lesser rights are given away, their extinction revives all rights in the owner.