Rethinking Unjust Enrichment

PROJECT BRIEF​

This project is about the incoherency of private law which should be attributed to the advances of the so-called ‘unjust enrichment’ movement across the world. Over the recent decades, the law of unjust enrichment has established itself as a new category of private law, alongside such classical categories as property, contract and tort. With the strong support of academics across the globe, the unjust enrichment dogma has been recognised by the courts of the highest authority in such countries as the UK, Canada, Germany, India, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Africa. Countries such as Australia stand at the verge of such recognition.

The Rethinking Unjust Enrichment aims to collect a contrary range of views which question the dominant position of the global movement of unjust enrichment. This is a clear, coherent, multi-layered, cross-jurisdictional and (hopefully) persuasive manifesto of sceptics, who point to serious deficiencies of the unjust enrichment movement, challenge its core claims and offer alternatives for a more coherent, self-reserved, historically accurate, tolerable, just, and efficient way to spell out the legal effects of basic interpersonal interactions. The project will accommodates a broad range of voices: starting with those scholars who think that the current unjust enrichment doctrine must be seriously qualified, ending with those scholars who think that it should be eliminated altogether.