movable and immovable

▪ legal concept

      in later Roman and modern civil-law systems, the basic division of things subject to ownership. In general, the distinction rests on ordinary conceptions of physical mobility: immovables would be such things as land or buildings, which are thought to be stationary in space; movables would be such things as cattle or personal belongings, which can either move themselves or be moved in space. The definition is by no means rigid, however; the law may be so written as to place a specified thing in one category or the other for the sake of legal convenience or utility, even though the thing may seem illogically categorized in the layman's mind. Thus, in French law, standing crops are movables; farm implements and animals are immovables (largely because they are thought to serve the land and be components of it). In German law, the distinction is somewhat clearer: immovables are tracts of land and their component parts; movables are everything else. In the Anglo-American common-law system, there exists a similar distinction between real (immovable) and personal (movable) property.

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