Foreign Comparisons
Unjust enrichment is a developed and coherent field in continental civil law systems. Continental lawyers say someone is unjustly enriched when there is no basis for their possession or title to some right or property. A more correct way of saying it is that someone has been "unjustifiedly enriched". In German, the term is Ungerechtfertigte Bereicherung (ยง812 BGB) and in France the term is Enrichissement sans cause. English lawyers, however, have been accustomed to identify an "unjust factor". The difference between "unjust factors" and "absence of basis" as a unifying principle has generated a lot of debate, particularly since Peter Birks changed his mind in his second edition of Unjust Enrichment (2005) in the Clarendon Law Series, and argued that the continentals had got it right.
The two leading theorists that have revived unjust enrichment were Lord Goff, who produced Goff and Jones on Restitution and Professor Peter Birks.
Read more about this topic: English Unjust Enrichment Law
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