I Setting the Scene:Pierson vPost, the Wily Quadruped, a Saucy Intruder, and Capture

Speaking at his retirement dinner on 26 October 2011, I suggested that I was perhaps not the right person to comment upon Adrian Bradbrook's long and distinguished career. My overriding concern then, as now, was simple: how to capture the essence of such a remarkable career; the work of someone who has contributed so much to scholarship, so much to the law, so much to an institution. Fittingly, I thought, it was a property case — Pierson v Post (‘Pierson’) — that best summarised my feelings about the task.

A case about the legal concept of capture, decided by the New York State Supreme Court of Judicature in 1805, Pierson involved a fox hunt, and, more specifically, property in a fox. My analogy is certainly not to the activity of the hunt itself, which most today would agree is a barbaric one. It is to the facts, or more specifically, the way in which they were related in the dissenting judgment of Livingston J. Justice Livingston, having made this decision in 1805, wrote with a slightly greater flare for the dramatic than we find in judicial writing today. He wrote that the case