This comprehensive yet accessible Research Handbook offers an expert guide to the key concepts, principles and debates in the modern law of unjust enrichment and restitution.

The articles, based on a symposium held in 2003, deal with numerous theoretical and practical issues that surround restitution and unjust enrichment.

Enrichment is key to understanding the law of unjust enrichment and restitution. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the concept of enrichment and its implications for restitutionary awards. Dr Lodder argues that enrichment may be characterised either factually or legally, and explores the consequences of that distinction. In factual enrichment cases, the measure of enrichment is the objective value received. This is the basis of many awards of money had and received, quantum meruit, quantum valebat and money paid. In legal enrichment cases, the benefit is the acquisition of a specific right or the release of a specific obligation. The remedy is restitution of that right or reinstatement of that obligation. It is demonstrated that specific restitution of the defendant's legal enrichment is often the basis for resulting trusts, rescission, rectification and subrogation. This book has profound implications for understanding restitutionary awards and the relationship between the enrichment inquiry and other aspects of the law of unjust enrichment, including the 'at the expense of' inquiry and the defence of change of position.

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.

"Although it is often referred to as "the third branch of private law", alongside contract and tort, the law of unjust enrichment and restitution is not well understood. That is true for a variety of reasons. The subject is seldom taught in law school. Many of the traditional cases speak in a language that is incomprehensible to modern ears. Most significantly, until now, there has not been a text that is structured in accordance with the modern Canadian principle of unjust enrichment.