Dr Rachel Leow

Dr Tim Liau

This course is available on the LLM (extended part-time), LLM (full-time), MSc in Law and Finance and University of Pennsylvania Law School LLM Visiting Students. This course is freely available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. It does not require permission. This course uses controlled access as part of the course selection process. For information on controlled access courses, including eligibility, application processes, deadlines, and departmental contact details, please refer to the Controlled Access Courses webpage.

How to apply: Priority will be given initially to LLM, MSc Regulation and MSc Law and Finance students on a first-come-first-served allocation.

Spaces permitting, requests from all other students will be processed on the same first-come-first-served allocation.

By submitting an application, students are confirming that they meet any pre-requisites specified. Providing an additional written statement will not aid a student's chances of being accepted onto a course, and statements are not read.

This topical course raises issues seen regularly at the highest levels of commercial litigation, in apex courts, for example those involving ultra vires interest rate swap agreements, and  restitution for overpaid taxes. It will complement other courses involving private law and commercial law, especially those falling within the Corporate and Commercial Law and International Business Law specialisation. It will be of particular appeal to those interested in commercial litigation.

This course is about the law of restitution. It is concerned with when one person can obtain the remedy of restitution from another. What is restitution? This is a key question that the students who take this course will explore and answer. The orthodox view is that where a person is ordered to make restitution to another person, that person must give back or give up gains that they have made. It can thus be thought of broadly as the law concerning gain-based remedies. It is not concerned with compensating the claimant for losses they have suffered. In this course, we will examine a wide array of situations when courts have awarded restitution, whether in response to unjust enrichment, or for some other reason.

Now seen by some as just as fundamental to private law as contract and tort, the law of restitution and unjust enrichment was long neglected as a subject. This has changed: over the last three or four decades, the law of restitution has been one of the most vibrant areas of modern private law, with extensive judicial and academic commentary across the common law world, including in the UK, Australia, Canada, Singapore.

After this course, students will have a deeper understanding of the law of restitution, its place and relationship with other private law subjects such as contract law, property law, and equity, and be introduced to modern debates about the law of restitution.

20 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

Essay.

1. Andrew Burrows, The Law of Restitution, 3rd ed (OUP 2011)

2. Robert Stevens, The Laws of Restitution (OUP 2023)

3. Charles Mitchell, Paul Mitchell, and Stephen Watterson (eds), Goff & Jones on Unjust Enrichment, 10th ed (Sweet & Maxwell 2022)

4. Peter Birks, Unjust Enrichment, 2nd ed (OUP 2005)

5. Elise Bant, Simone Degeling, and Kit Barker (eds) Research Handbook on Unjust Enrichment and Restitution (Edward Elgar Publishing 2020)

Exam (100%), duration: 150 Minutes in the Spring exam period.