bona vacantia
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 321 U.S. 233 - Anderson Nat Bank v. Luckett · 1944Most cited · 786 citing opinions
At common law, abandoned personal property was not the subject of escheat, but was subject only to the right of appropriation by the sovereign as bona vacantia.
How often courts cite the case defining “bona vacantia”
Court decisions citing the opinion that defined “bona vacantia” — 785 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining case as a whole, not verified uses of the term. The dip in the most recent years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the latest years.