8. Is unjust enrichment a thing? With Duncan Sheehan

Duncan Sheehan is Professor of Business Law at the University of Leeds. He is interested in trusts and personal property law, especially secured transactions law. He has a particular recent interest in the application of the philosophy of action to the law, as well as a wider interest in private law theory more generally. 

Unjust enrichment is a distinctive and, some might say, weird area of law. It is supposed to cover cases in which someone acquires a benefit of some kind at the expense of another person in a way that is unjust, and which leads to a requirement for restitution. It's not the same as fraud or theft, partly because the person who has been unjustly enriched might never have intended to be enriched. But it has proven surprisingly difficult for legal scholars to say exactly what it is, or what precisely links all the cases that are usually brought together under the heading of unjust enrichment, which has led some to call for it to be abolished. Nonetheless, Professor Sheehan does think it's a thing, and thinks it should continue to be a thing, and in this conversation he explains why.

As someone who was once massively overpaid by my employer (and was honest enough to give the money back, otherwise I probably wouldn't be admitting to it here) I was interested to find out what the law thinks about this issue...

Duncan's book, The Scope and Structure of Unjust Enrichment will be published in February 2024. Chapters 1 and 3 cover the issues discussed in the podcast.

Duncan also recommends the following two articles:

Hedley, S. 'What is Unjust Enrichment for?' (2016) 16 Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal 333 (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2805475)

Jaffey, P. 'The Unjust Enrichment Fallacy and Private Law' (2013) 28 Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence 115 (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3799149) 

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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