Quasi-contract

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An american attempt to describe the law of restitution. Eventually, they have up and just called it restitution, but it does show how they were struggling to understand how this “duck-billed platypus” of the common law fitted in to the grand scheme of things. That struggle goes on, with unfortunate decisions such as Citigroup v Brigade Capital Management.

The Americans do like their quasi-legal concepts. Quasi-agency is another.

Restitution — a.k.a unjust enrichment, or money had and received — is a claim made feasible through an imaginative synthesis of long-“forgotten” rules[1] of the common law, dreamt up by Lord Goff[2] to bring justice to little old ladies, welsh hoteliers and others — not, apparently, including financial services conglomerates — who have been dealt a short hand by the cosmic game.

Difficult cases involving such unfortunates (and the odd gambling-addict conveyancer) gave rise to an entire branch of civil law known as restitution, a common lawyer’s duck-billed platypus: an ancient civil action, latterly back in fashion, that sounds neither in contract — there is none — or tort — there has been none — but sits uneasily between them, in its own jurisprudential space, rather like our old friend Bob Cunis: neither one thing nor the other; a sort of law of equity for people who don’t like the law of equity or the floppiness and uncertainty it tends to bring.

See also