The Client came to us in early June of 2026 with a grievance she described, on the consultation form, as "small but profound." Some three weeks prior, the Respondent had requested the use of the family vehicle for what she had characterized, with great specificity, as "a five-minute thing." The Client had handed over the keys. The duration of the Respondent's absence had, in the event, been forty-one minutes, a deviation the Client had noted but did not, on its own, find actionable.
What the Client found actionable was the discovery, on the following morning, that all six of the FM radio presets in the vehicle — presets which the Client had assembled over the course of years, which she could recite from memory in numerical order, and which represented the totality of her radio life — had been reassigned. The new presets, on the Client's investigation, were two pop stations she did not recognize, one rap station whose call letters she could not identify, an R&B station, a Spanish-language station of indeterminate genre, and one talk-radio station the Client could only describe as "shouting." The original presets had not been preserved in any backup state. They were gone.
The Client had retained, on her phone, a screen-photograph of the head-unit display before the loan; the photograph, time-stamped, demonstrated the prior configuration. She produced the photograph at our consultation. The presets had been, in order: a public-radio news station, a public-radio music station, a classical station, a 1980s rock retrospective, a station that played mostly Carole King, and an oldies station the Client conceded she had not actually listened to in over a year.
The Respondent's Theory
The Respondent, when interviewed, did not deny the reassignment. She argued, instead, that the reassignment was justified on multiple grounds. First, she said, the prior presets had been "actually cooked," by which she meant — on inquiry — that they had not, on her assessment, kept up with contemporary developments in the field. The classical station, she observed, had been playing the same Brahms for years. The Carole King station was, she said, "literally just Carole King." The oldies station was, in her summary, "for people who think the seventies are old."
Second, she argued that the act of driving the vehicle conferred, for the duration of the drive, a kind of conditional usufruct over the audio system — a right to use and adjust without consultation — and that her reconfiguration of the presets had been an exercise of this right. The reconfiguration's permanence was, she conceded, a feature of the head unit rather than of her intent. She had meant only to enjoy the stations during her drive; the head unit had committed her preferences without asking whether she meant them.
Third, she argued in the alternative that the prior presets could be reconstructed from memory, and that the Client's distress was therefore disproportionate to the actual loss. The Client, who had spent four minutes attempting to reconstruct them while the Respondent watched, declined to dignify this argument with a response.
The Journal's Assessment
The Journal observes that the Respondent's first argument is not strictly a legal argument; it is an aesthetic complaint about her mother's radio habits and is not properly before this tribunal. We note in passing that the merits of Brahms are not amenable to popular vote.
The second argument, however, raises a genuine doctrinal question. There is in the law a recognized category of right — the usufruct — by which a party may use and benefit from property owned by another without acquiring title. It is an old right, of Roman descent, and it traditionally extends to perishables and the products of land. The Respondent's contention that it extends, by analogy, to head-unit memory positions is structurally interesting and, on the Journal's assessment, wrong. The doctrine we propose for the case is presumed preset usufruct — the proposition that the borrower of a vehicle may operate the audio system freely during the loan but bears a strict duty to restore the head unit to its prior configuration at the conclusion of the loan, on penalty of having converted what was, until that moment, only a temporary use.
The presets are not the radio. The presets are the radio's memory of who has the right to listen to it, and the alteration of memory in a shared instrument is a graver act than the temporary use of it.
Disposition
The matter resolved through a manual restoration of the original presets, conducted by the Respondent under the Client's supervision, with the Client reading the call letters aloud from her screen-photograph and the Respondent setting each preset in turn. The exercise took eleven minutes. The Respondent expressed, at its conclusion, that the experience had been "a lot." The Client, who had derived a certain satisfaction from the proceedings, did not respond. The vehicle has not, since, been loaned to the Respondent.