FACTOR ACTS. The legal designation of a series of modern .statutes in England and Amer ica, conferring upon agents who are intrusted with the possession of goods the authority to vest a good title thereto in an innocent purchaser. At common law a factor (q.v.) had no implied authority to pledge or barter his principal's goods. Even when they were shipped to him, and their possession as well as the hill of lading or other document of title intrusted to him, he had not the legal power to pledge or barter them. The common-law doctrine, that a person cannot give a better title than he possesses, enabled the principal to recover his property from a pledgee, although the latter hail advanced money to the factor in the honest belief that he was the true owner. The ineonvertienees resulting from this principle, with the opportunities for fraud which it permitted. led the mercantile and banking community to demand that a person into whose possession goods or docionents of title were out by the true owner lie I mated as having rinquati lied prmer to dispose of Ilion. Partial effort was given to this view in England by the Factors Art of Melt. IV. e. 94), and in a few of our States by legislation fashioned after that stat ute. Under these nets, factors or agents of a similar character, who are intrusted with the possession of goods or the documents of title thereto for the purpose of sale, are to be deemed the true owner,. so far as to give validity to any
sale or pledge made by them to an innocent pur chaser or pledgee for value. In England the now doctrine has been carried even further than this The courts there, as here, having construed the earlier acts very strictly, the mercantile com munity has insisted upon their repeated revision: each new statute going further than its predeces sor toward the substitution for the common-law rule, stated above, of the doctrine which prevails upon the Continent of Europe, that any one in the possession of goods, with the consent of the owner. whether a factor or not, shall be able to give a perfect title thereto to an innocent pur chaser for value from him. This legislation, taken with that upon conditional sales, has prac tically abrogated, so far as personal property is concerned, the former doctrine of the common law that the purchaser of property buys it at his peril. and gets only such title as his vendor has to give. Sec CAVEAT EMPTOS. Consult: Chambers, Sale of Goods Act (London, 1899) ; Kerr Pearson Gee, on the Sale of Goods Act (Lon don, 1893) ; Burdick, The Law of Sales of Per sonal Property (Boston, 1901) ; Benjamin. Trea tise on the Law of the Sale of Personal Property (London, I900).