The publication of the Restatement Third: Unjust Enrichment and Restitution by the American Law Institute in July 2010 was an event of major importance, not only for the development of the law of unjust enrichment in the US, but also for global scholarship relating to this area of private law. The Restatement First appeared in 1937, and the Restatement Second was abandoned; hence the Restatement Third is the most significant survey of the American law on this topic for over 70 years. Private law has been a comparatively neglected area of study in US law schools for several decades, and this is particularly true of the law of unjust enrichment. However, the appearance of the Restatement Third has prompted a renewal of interest in the subject among US scholars, and it is hoped that the present volume of essays will contribute to this revival, while reflecting on the lessons to be learned from the Restatement by other legal systems. Featuring the work of leading scholars from the UK, Germany, South Africa, Canada, Hong Kong and Australia, the essays undertake critical and comparative analysis of the Restatement, and offer fresh insights into the rules that it articulates.

Rev. ed. of : Handbook on the law of remedies. 1973.

This Restatement presents a distillation of the current state of the common law of unjust enrichment into a coherent set of doctrines. Written by an authority in the area, assisted by senior judges, academics, and practitioners, the Restatement offers a persuasive statement of the law in this newly recognized and uncertain branch of the common law.

This 2004 book provides acomprehensive account of the American law of restitution.

Restitution is the body of law concerned with taking away gains that someone has wrongfully obtained. The operator of a Ponzi scheme takes money from his victims by fraud and then invests it in stocks that rise in value. Or a company pays a shareholder excessive dividends or pays them to the wrong person. Or a man poisons his grandfather and then collects under the grandfather’s will. In each of these cases, one party is unjustly enriched at the expense of another. And in all of them the law of restitution provides a way to undo the enrichment and transfer the defendant’s gains to a party with better rights to them. Tort law focuses on the harm, or costs, that one party wrongfully imposes on another. Restitution is the mirror image; it corrects gains that one party wrongfully receives at another’s expense. It is an important topic for every lawyer and for anyone else interested in how the legal system responds to injustice. In Restitution, Ward Farnsworth presents a guide to this body of law that is compact, lively, and insightful—the first treatment of its kind that the American law of restitution has received. The book explains restitution doctrines, remedies, and defenses with unprecedented clarity and illustrates them with vivid examples. Farnsworth demonstrates that the law of restitution is guided by a manageable and coherent set of principles that have remarkable versatility and power. Restitution makes a complex and important area of law accessible, understandable, and interesting to any reader.

"This book discusses developments in scholarship dedicated to reinvigorating the study of the broad domain of private law. This field, which embraces the traditional common law subjects-property, contracts, and torts-as well as adjacent, more statutory areas, such as intellectual property and commercial law, also includes important subjects that have been neglected in the United States but are beginning to make a comeback. The book particularly focuses on the New Private Law, an approach that aims to bring a new outlook to the study of private law by moving beyond reductively instrumentalist policy evaluation and narrow, rule-by-rule, doctrine-by-doctrine analysis, so as to consider and capture how private law's various features fit and work together, as well as the normative underpinnings of these larger structures. This movement is resuscitating the notion of private law itself in United States and has brought an interdisciplinary perspective to the more traditional, doctrinal approach prevalent in Commonwealth countries. The book embraces a broad range of perspectives to private law-including philosophical, economic, historical, and psychological- yet it offers a unifying theme of seriousness about the structure and content of private law."--

This highly-praised textbook provides detailed and incisive coverage of all aspects of restitution. The author's expert analysis and clarity of style will be invaluable to both students and practitioners with an interest in this area of law.