The conclusion broadens the analysis and compares the rise of flexibility in property to changes in other social institutions that have a physical presence in the world and are traditionally understood as contributing to spatial stability, such as the family, the workplace and the community. It proceeds to explain the property exceptionalism that is the core of this book.

The chapter establishes the centrality of stability in property law and theory today. It depicts and characterizes the legal protection of attachment, control, and possession as constituting a vision of stability. The chapter then analyzes and defends this conclusion along three categories: theories and justifications supporting the right to private property, legal doctrines, and doctrines that work to protect stable property relationships. It argues, following the famous Marxian distinction, that while property law accommodates a great level of flexibility in exchange value, it does not facilitate the same level of flexibility when it comes to use value. Use of physical property continues to be intimately tied to attachment and stability.

This chapter explains how voluntarily assumed obligations arising at common law, and also in equity, may not be unilaterally changed by the obligor thereto without the prior assent of the obligee. Wesley Hohfeld's jural relations of claim-right/duty; power/liability; privilege/no-right; and immunity/disability are employed to demonstrate that the identity of an obligee to an obligation (‘to whom’ the obligation is owed), is just as much a part of the specificatin of the obligation as, say, the specification as to ‘what’ is to be performed.

This chpater explains how the so-called ‘rule’ in Dearle v. Hall is not a special rule devised in connection with equitable assigments, but us actually the working-out the general rule of priority in equity, that qui prior est tempore potior est jure (‘he who is first in time has the better right’) in light of the Golden Rule, that one should do as one would wish to be done by. This chapter reveals that it is the giving of notice of assignment which is key, so as to bring an assignee within the Golden Rule, thereby potentially putting such assignee in a position of a better equity as compared with an assignee who had not acted in accordance with the Golden Rule.

This chapter explains in detail how the doctrine of estoppel by res judicata operates in conjunction with equitable assignments of equitable choses in action so as to lead to the result that joinder of the assignor in such proceedings is not absolutely necessry, though it may be prudent and advisable to do so. It explains the difference between the recognition of a doctrine, and its enforcement. In particular, it highlights how, since an equitable assignment is an equitable doctrine, a court acting within its equitable jurisdiction would not only recognise its operation, but would also be in a position to grant equitabel remedies to enforce the entitements arising by reason of such equitable doctrine.

This chapter summarises the principal argument of the book, that equitable assignment is a sui generis institution developed by the courts of Equity, and which has two principal effects. One, a ‘trust’ effect, and the other, an unusual ‘agency’ effect. This chapter also briefly explains Wesley Hohfeld'seight fundamental jural relations which will be applied in the analysis of the law in the following chapters.

This chapter explains how the courts of common law, by way of contrast to the courts of equity, were only in a position to recognise equitable doctrines such as equitable assignment. However,they were unable to give effect to such doctrines: they could not (and still may not) grant common law remedies to enforce such equitable entitlements. This resulted in a potential problem of proceedings being brought at common law, as well as in equity. Consequently, to forestall such problems, joinder of the assignor of a common law chose even when proceedings were brought in equity became the norm.

Receipt of notice of assignment alerts the obligee to the equtiable duties as are owed by the assignor to her assignee, In addition to the substantive liability which may arise should the obligor dishonestly assist the assignor in breaching her duties to her assignee (as discussed in the previous chpater), this chapter will explian further procedural effects as may arise from such notice, and will show how these procedural effects lie at the hart of the proposition that an assignee always takes ‘subject to equities', but such equities will stop running against the assignoee once the the obligor becomes aware of the assignment.

This chapter explores the two main conceptions of equtiable assignment as are currently found in the academic discourse, namely, a ‘substitutive transfer’ model, and a ‘partial trust’ model. The former denies that an equitable assignment operates by way of a trust, at all. The latter, however, admits taht where a legal chose in action is equtably assigned, some form of trustee-beneficiary relationship arises between the assignor and her assignee. But it denies that this arises when an equtiable chose in action is equitably assigned. The ‘partial trust’ model therefore takes equitable assignment to be a fragemented doctrrine which works differently, depending on whether the chose that is to be assigned is a common law chose, or one which arises in equity. This chapter then shows how each of these models are deficient, before showing how a composite model of equitable assignment would avoid these deficiencies.

This chapter explains how ‘statutory’ assignment under the Law of Property 1925, section 136(1) operates. It subjects the section to close scrutiny, and identifies that the statute operates by supplementing the effects as would otherwise arise by way of an equitable assignment.