It’s actually a lot more complicated than that, even:
In order to start the statute running in most cases, the possession must have been “open and notorious” rs2477roads.com, which didn’t happen here. There are other elements that might prove difficult to establish as well, *e.g., *
(Emphasis added).
The possession was hardly open and notorious, and it is doubtful whether she could establish an objectively reasonable basis for a belief that she or her father was the owner of the property, especially since it’s been kept quiet all this time.
I was talking about the coins from the OP. They’ve never been legally owned by anybody except the US government.
As I recall, the government tried to impound the auctioned coin as well. But they ran into the problem that it was outside of the United States and the people that had possession refused to return it. So the government negotiated a deal but said that it was not a precedent for any future coins that turned up. In the current case, the government has legal title to the coins and possession - I think Ms Langbord is SOL.
I wonder why Mr. Switt wouldn’t even have left word to his heirs about the coins. Was he that paranoid about their secrecy that he would risk getting his family into legal trouble rather than informing them?
I won’t even entertain the possibility that he simply forgot he had them.
I Googled this topic the day the OP appeared. One web page that described Switt gratuitously as a “Jewish jeweler,” which I thought was a teeny bit offensive.
You mean post-WWI. The pre-war Mark was backed by gold just like the currencies of all major industrialized countries of the era, simply because the gold standard was the ruling regime at that time. The big inflation occurred after the war, reaching its peak in 1923 when the gold mark was traded at about one billion paper marks.
In 1933, the ban on possessing gold was part of the devaluation of the dollar. Ever since 1834, the American gold standard had been working in a way that, essentially, the price of gold was fixed at $20.67 per ounce - this was the price at which the Treasury was obliged to buy and sell gold, and you could carry the amount of gold equivalent to a gold coin to the Mint and have it coined for you (until 1900, the US was de jure on a bimetallic standard with gold and silver running parallelly as currency; but since the market price of silver bullion was actually higher than 1/16 of the price of gold, as it was officially assessed by coinage legislation, nobody was coining silver and America had a de facto gold standard).
The 1933 reform essentially devalued the dollar - from $20.67 per ounce of gold that had prevailed for a century to $35 per ounce. This went along with the introduction of capital controls to prevent the outflow of liquidity to other countries to fight deflation; and since money, under a gold standard regime, is essentially synonymous to gold, private possession of gold was banned to prevent speculators to move American gold abroad whenever profit margins would arise.
Not if you don’t own the property, which is the government’s position in this case. The gov’t doesn’t have to compensate you for something that you stole.
BTW, in my last post, I forgot to mention that there is a five-year statute of limitations on counterfeiting. OTOH, counterfeit coins are still subject to forfeiture.
While I have never been a fan of FDR, or his solutions to the political issues of the time, the decision about gold ownership is not one of his more “dictatorial” actions. All nations at that time had to do something about their monetary systems, having gone off strict gold standards. FDR’s solution was no more onerus than that chosen by any other country. And since the owners were compensated for their gold, it was a better result than could have been expected in some ways; after all, if something is made illegal to own, the government isn’t required to buy it back from you.