Document Type

Book Review

Publication Date

1999

Abstract

Whatever happened to the study of restitution? Once a core private law subject along with property, torts, and contracts, restitution has receded from American legal scholarship. Few law professors teach the material, fewer still write in the area, and no one even agrees what the field comprises anymore. Hanoch threatens to reverse the tide and make restitution interesting again. The book takes commonplace words such as "value" and "gain" and shows how they embody a society's underlying normative principles. Variations across cultures in the law of unjust enrichment reflect differences in national understandings of sharing, property, and even personhood. As Dagan puts it, he seeks “the reflection of core social values in the technicalities of the law.”

Disciplines

Civil Rights and Discrimination | Law | Law and Economics | Law and Race | Religion Law

Comments

Unjust Enrichment: A Study of Private Law and Public Values by Hanoch Dagan, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 185, $59.95.

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