Equity Will Not Aid A Volunteer
Equity cannot be used to take back a benefit that was voluntarily but mistakenly conferred without consultation of the receiver. This maxim protects the doctrine of choice.
This maxim is very important in restitution. Restitution developed as a series of writs called special assumpsit, which were later additions in the courts of law, and were more flexible tools of recovery, based on equity. Restitution could provide means of recovery when people bestowed benefits on one another (such as giving money or providing services) according to contracts that would have been legally unenforceable.
However, pursuant to the equitable maxim, restitution does not allow a volunteer or "officious intermeddler" to recover. A volunteer is not merely someone who acts selflessly. In the legal (and equitable) context, it refers to someone who provides a benefit regardless of whether the recipient wants it. For example, when someone mistakenly builds an improvement on a home, neither equity nor restitution will allow the improver to recover from the homeowner.
An exception to this maxim can be seen in cases where the doctrine of estoppel applies.
Read more about this topic: Maxims Of Equity
Famous quotes containing the words equity, aid and/or volunteer:
“If equity and human natural reason were allowed there would be no law, there would be no lawyers.”
—Christina Stead (1902–1983)
“The duty of the State toward the citizen is the duty of the servant to its master.... One of the duties of the State is that of caring for those of its citizens who find themselves the victims of such adverse circumstances as makes them unable to obtain even the necessities for mere existence without the aid of others.... To these unfortunate citizens aid must be extended by government—not as a matter of charity but as a matter of social duty.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“We should have an army so organized and so officered as to be capable in time of emergency, in cooperation with the National Militia, and under the provision of a proper national volunteer law, rapidly to expand into a force sufficient to resist all probable invasion from abroad and to furnish a respectable expeditionary force if necessary in the maintenance of our traditional American policy which bears the name of President Monroe.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)