Unmixing intangible assets

It is a common situation in commercial life that assets become separably but unidentifiably mixed and then need to be ‘unmixed’. There will be withdrawals from the mixture, and the parties with interests in it will wish to assert individual ownership over the withdrawals. The problem is most acute for intangible assets, such as choses in action, which are nothing but reified rights to take legal action and therefore have no ‘natural’ or physical comparator on which rules for unmixing can be based. No value-neutral standard can allocate property rights on unmixing; the law creates its own standards and rules.