> Seriously - has the idea of an object without will being named a defendant ever been challenged in the courts? Don't tell me that the person who owned the mon

> Seriously - has the idea of an object without will being named a defendant ever been challenged in the courts? Don't tell me that the person who owned the money has no standing - they certainly had property taken from them. Funnily enough, the idea of suing the property is actually a well-established legal concept, at least generally [1]. It falls under the "in rem" jurisdiction of the court, which is its power over things, as opposed to power over people (which would be the more familiar "in personam", where a person is named in a suit or complaint). Where in rem jurisdiction gets problematic is its use in civil forfeitures, for the reasons you say: The presumptive owner of the seized property is in fact readily available (i.e. the person it was seized from), and so any complaint should rightly proceed against them in personam, not against the property in rem. Also note that the money isn't being named as a "defendant" as such -- a defendant is a party you'd find in a criminal case, and this is a civil forfeiture. In a civil forfeiture, since the complaint is indeed against the property, the owner of the property is a third-party to the case. At this point the government pretends that the true owner of the property is unknown, so to fight the seizure it's first necessary for you to (a) legally assert ownership, and (b) legally deny the allegations in the seizure complaint. And only THEN can you proceed to the long and costly litigation against the government in which you must actually prove these assertions/denials. If things go well, some months or years later you'll get your stuff back. If you're really lucky, the legal costs won't have exceeded the value involved in the first place. Meanwhile, in many civil cash seizures, the money has gone straight into the slush fund of the local police department that confiscated it... and the whole thing starts to look like one big end-run around due process and constitutional protection. BTW, the government/courts also perform criminal forfeitures, which might be what you're thinking of where a confiscation involves a named defendant. For example, a punitive forfeiture doled out to a guilty defendant in a criminal trial. [1] The legendary case of United States v. Article Consisting of 50,000 Cardboard Boxes More or Less, Each Containing One Pair of Clacker Balls provides an amusing example of the way these suits are styled.