Pledge (law)
type of legal relationship
A pledge is a bailment that conveys title to property owned by a debtor (the pledgor) to a creditor (the pledgee) to secure repayment for some debt or obligation and to the mutual benefit of both parties. The term is also used to denote the property which constitutes the security. The pledge is a type of security interest. Pledge is the pignus of Roman law, from which most of the modern European-based law on the subject is derived, but is generally a feature of even the most basic legal systems. A pledge of personal property is known as a pawn.
Features
The pledgee has the right of selling the pledge if the pledgor fails to make payment at the stipulated time. No title to a third party purchaser is guaranteed following a wrongful sale except in the case of property passing by delivery, such as money or negotiable securities. In all other cases, persons must show that they are a bona fide purchaser, for (good) value, without notice (BFP). In the case of some types of property as defined on the detailed laws of the jurisdiction, such a new possessor (BFP) must have first consulted (before purchase) revealing no other ownership and then made a public notice or registered their title in a court-recognized register before the pledgor.
By legal system
Civil law system
In earlier medieval law, especially in Germanic law, two types of pledge existed, being either possessory (cf.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pledge (law)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.