Theology in Vincent v Lake Erie

The famous US case of Vincent v Lake Erie refers to the view of theologians that ‘a starving man may, without moral guilt, take what is necessary to sustain life, but it could hardly be said that the obligation would not be upon such a person to pay the value of the property so taken when he becomes able to do so.’ In fact, this view was controversial among scholastic thinkers of the medieval and early modern period. This lecture outlines this controversy by considering the three apparently inconsistent ideas pertinent to the late medieval conception of private property: common possession in the Garden of Eden, the postlapsarian institution of private property, and the use of another’s property in circumstances of extreme necessity. At the heart of this triad of ideas is the distinction between negating and limiting the original natural right to common possession. The lecture suggests that the modern notion of proportionality provides a conceptual and sequential framework for understanding the relationship between these three ideas. Scholastic thinkers differed on whether necessitous use was a matter of justice that went to the operation of rights as they evolved from the Garden of Eden (in which case, compensation was due for damages done by the use) or a matter of charity (in which case, compensation was not due). In its treatment of the three ideas, the scholastic literature attests to the relevance of sequential reasoning in law and especially to the importance of distinguishing between the scope and the operation of a right. A cause of the continuing perplexity about Vincent is the inattention to the sequential nature of the reasoning needed to resolve it.