R v Morris

Facts

The defendant, in a self-service store, replaced the price labels on goods with labels showing lower prices than those the store had put on them. He then took the goods to the checkout, where he was arrested. The same issue arose in the companion case of Anderton v Burnside, which involved similar conduct.

Issue

Whether switching price labels, before the goods are paid for, is an appropriation for the purposes of theft under section 3(1) of the Theft Act 1968, given that it involves the assumption of only some of the rights of the owner and is not itself a taking of the goods.

Held

The appeals were dismissed and the convictions upheld. The label switching was an appropriation of the goods, and the other elements of theft were made out.

Ratio

• Appropriation under section 3(1) is any assumption of any one of the rights of the owner, and it is not necessary that the defendant assumes all of them.
• An appropriation involves some adverse interference with or usurpation of a right of the owner, so that doing what the owner has authorised, such as taking goods from the shelf for the purpose of buying them, is not an appropriation.

The judgments

Key reasoning

• Section 3(1) defines appropriation as any assumption of the rights of an owner, and the words are in the plural but do not require the assumption of all of the rights of ownership, which would make no sense given that a thief does not take every right.
• The decision of the House in Lawrence v Metropolitan Police Commissioner [1972] AC 626, that an appropriation may occur even though the owner consents to the taking, was accepted as binding, but the House explained that the act must be one that goes beyond what the owner has authorised.
• By changing the label the defendant took to himself the right of the store to set the price, which was an adverse interference with its rights, so that the appropriation was complete when the label was switched.

Where it fits in the module

In the Property Offences topic the case is the starting point for the debate about the reach of appropriation in theft, which turns on whether the act must be unauthorised. It is read with Lawrence, and with the later decisions in Gomez [1993] AC 442 and Hinks [2001] 2 AC 241, as part of the question whether theft should depend on dishonesty alone.

Criticisms

• The adverse interference test introduced a requirement that is hard to reconcile with the language of the statute and with the earlier rule in Lawrence that consent is irrelevant to appropriation.
• By treating the label switch as a complete appropriation the case pushes theft back to the point of preparation, since no goods are yet taken from the control of the store.
• The later decisions in Gomez and Hinks rejected an adverse interference limit, which suggests the House in Morris produced an unstable middle position on appropriation.