Tel Aviv University Legal Working Paper Series
Tel Aviv University Law Faculty Papers
JUST AND UNJUST ENRICHMENTS
Article comments
Hanoch Dagan, "Just and Unjust Enrichment".
Abstract
In exploring the most fundamental question in restitution theory of what separates just from unjust enrichments, this essay undertakes three interconnected missions. The first is to situate the types of cases that prompt liability in restitution within a wider universe of enrichments, including those that trigger taxation as well as those deemed benevolent. My second mission is to defend the view that the concept of property cannot serve as the baseline for distinguishing just from unjust enrichments, and we should instead resort to the normative guidance of the foundational liberal values of autonomy, utility, and community. My third task is to show that this orientation need not generate legal indeterminacy or strip the law of restitution from its constitutive characteristics as one part of our private law. Rather, I argue that my approach to restitution theory can yield a happy doctrine, composed of sharp rules and not vague standards, and responsive to the properly interpreted injunction of correlativity that underlies the legitimacy of private law.
Subject Area
Contracts, General Law, Jurisprudence, Property-Personal and Real, Public Law and Legal Theory, Remedies, Torts
Recommended Citation
Hanoch Dagan,
"JUST AND UNJUST ENRICHMENTS"
(June 2008).
Tel Aviv University Legal Working Paper Series.
Tel Aviv University Law Faculty Papers.
Working Paper 87.
http://law.bepress.com/taulwps/fp/art87
No readers' reactions have been posted for this article. To submit one, copy the URL for this article (http://law.bepress.com/taulwps/fp/art87) and click here.