“Unjust Enrichment” – the Potion that Induces Well-meaning Sloppiness of thought

Speaker: Professor Peter Watts (The University of Auckland New Zealand)
Chair: Rt Hon. Lady Justice Arden, Royal Courts of Justice
Admission: Free
Accreditation: This event is accredited with 1 CPD hour with the SRA and BSB
Series: Current Legal Problems 2015-16

About the lecture

Subsequent to Banque Financière de la Cité v Parc (Battersea) Ltd (1998) the courts of England and Wales began to signal that the law of restitution might be reducible to a single principle, that of unjust enrichment.

Fuelled by Lord Steyn’s adoption in that case of the academician’s naive 4-stage test for unjust enrichment, there has since 2007 been very rapid expansion of the concept. Australian law has been heading in the opposite direction. So, English courts now seem ready to scrutinise all potential increases in another’s wealth where the claimant can establish a sufficient involuntary connection to that increase.

This lecture argues that the English legal system is making a very serious mistake. Unjust enrichment is both too broad and too narrow to be a satisfactory legal concept. Citizens involuntarily increase one another’s wealth in innumerable ways in their day-to-day interactions and the law should not start from an assumption that such increases need to be justified. The paper argues that in general there needs to be either a (traceable) transfer of property involved, or a request for services.

At the same time, in many, if not most, of the standard restitutionary fact patterns enrichment is either absent or irrelevant (as a driver of the law). Forcing the law of restitution into a template of unjust enrichment is calculated to disform the law. English case law has got to the point where carefully considered decisions of appellate courts before 1990 are being ignored in every direction.

About the speaker

Professor Peter Watts is a graduate of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and of the University of Cambridge. He has been a member of the Law Faculty at The University of Auckland since 1985. His principal teaching and research interests are in the law of agency, company law, and the law of restitution.

He is the General Editor of Bowstead & Reynolds on Agency, having carried principal responsibility for the 19th and 20th editions. His other books include P Watts, N Campbell and C Hare, Company Law in New Zealand (2011) and P Watts Directors’ Powers and Duties (2nd ed 2015).

He is the New Zealand Contributing Editor for the Restitution Law Review, and has been a regular contributor to the Law Quarterly Review for 25 years, as well as other leading law journals, on a wide range of aspects of the common law and equity.

He is a door tenant at Fountain Court Chambers, The Temple, London. In 2013, he was made a New Zealand Queen’s Counsel, and in 2014 a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

About Current Legal Problems

The Current Legal Problems annual lecture series was established over sixty years ago. The lectures are public, delivered on a weekly basis and chaired by members of the judiciary.

The Current Legal Problems (CLP) annual volume is published on behalf of UCL Laws by Oxford University Press, and features scholarly articles that offer a critical analysis of important current legal issues.

It covers all areas of legal sponsorship and features a wide range of methodological approaches to law. With its emphasis on contemporary developments, CLP is a major point of reference for legal scholarship.

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