Submitted by the Council to the members of the American Law Institute for discussion at the seventy-seventh annual meeting on May 15, 16, 17, and 18, 2000.
Restitution is a body of law that has immense practical value and wide application to disputes of all sorts. Simply put, it is the set of rules that govern recovery of gains that a party should not keep—or “unjust enrichment,” as it is formally called; and unjust enrichment occurs every day in both private and commercial transactions. Restitution has the dual distinction of being one of the most useful but overlooked bodies of law, due to its lack of study by several generations of modern lawyers. Without a single casebook in print on the subject, it has been nearly impossible to teach restitution law in the past. Restitution and Unjust Enrichment: Cases and Notes fills that void and presents the substance, remedies and history of restitution in a practical and interesting manner. Professors and students will benefit from: The only casebook available for teaching this important and interesting subject, and the first new one in 50 years. A modern reworking of the topic that adopts the framework of Publication of Restatement Third, Restitution and Unjust Enrichment (2011) (“R3RUE”) for teaching purposes. A complete discussion of Restitution, which is part of the required curriculum for students who receive legal training in other parts of the common-law world. Authorship by leading scholars in the field. Andrew Kull was the sole Reporter for R3RUE, published in two hardcover volumes. Ward Farnsworth is the author of a convenient treatise on Restitution, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2014. He is also co-author of the Wolters Kluwer casebook Torts: Cases and Questions, currently in its second edition.
This title was first published in 2001. In the Western legal tradition, the history of restitution for unjust enrichment reaches back to pre-classical Roman law. In common law, the roots of unjust enrichment may be said to lie in the fourteenth century; but its history as a subject of academic study is much shorter. The law of restitution has become increasingly important in the courts of the common law world during the last decade. This has generated a great deal of scholarly attention and there has been an explosion of literature as legal academics have addressed the theoretical foundations of the subject, its structure and its underlying principles.
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 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.