Jointly owned chattels

The concept of joint ownership of indivisible assets can cause difficulties, at least for those unfamiliar with the law of property. Most obviously the difficulties arise where land is jointly owned, and one of the joint owners wishes to know which part of the house or farm belongs to him, and may be occupied by him alone. At least, in the case of land, there may be the possibility of a partition of land so that each of the erstwhile joint owners can become the sole owner of a defined area of land. Such an approach can hardly work in the case of, for example, a valuable painting. Different considerations, may arise in the case of a set or collection of valuable chattels where a division of individual items between different beneficiaries will not lead to irrevocable physical destruction even though there may still be the problem that, purely in valuation terms, the sum of the parts is less than the value of the whole. The court has had to address these issues in Butler and Another v Butler and Another [2016] EWHC 1793.