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I am totally with you in this line of argument. However, I think there might be a legal framework in which the stolen good might locally be yours within the context of a single transaction or dispute. E.g: if I buy a car from you for X$, and you deliver it, that's your car for the purposes of that deal. If it later turns out it was stolen, that changes the facts and is an additive change not a transformative change to the original transaction. If we imagine a chain of transactions, you might analyze the dispute as it spreads through the contract chain through a centrallized birds-eye doctrine, or you might analyze the matter contract by contract, in a sort of distributed algorithm. In that latter sense, it makes sense to refer to the asset as property of one party independently of whether it will truly be deemed as theirs. Under this frame, for the purpose of that contract, there is an implicit claim of property, and an implicit risk of the asset being stolen. If the car is later found to be stolen, it isn't parsed as the car being property of someone else, much less always having been of someone else, but rather there would be a new fact: of there being a competing claim of ownership over the asset, which might or might not have legal and ethical grounds, and might or might not be successfully defended in a court, resulting in an obligation to return the asset, devaluing the ownership claim to 0. Mathematically the asset being traded is no longer the subject of the contract, rather it'd be about a legal and ethical claim to the asset itself, which has a subjective value p between 0 and 1, which when multiplied by the value of the asset yields the Expected Value EV. There is a market for ownership claims where p<1 all the way to p>0. Theft and criminal charges need not always be the reason there is uncertainty over ownership, succession disputes, bankruptcies, ongoing litigation over the asset, patents, ip claims, wars, etc... |