By Professor Graham Virgo
Downing College, University of Cambridge
The central premise of C J Sansom’s excellent novel Dominion, is that Britain surrendered to Germany in 1940 and became a satellite state of the Third Reich. Sansom describes a very different world as a consequence of this surrender, but one populated by real people whose lives were put on a very different course by that single momentous event. Such counter-factual, ‘what if?’, history is fascinating. The same game can be played with the law of restitution. What if England had not recognised the law of unjust enrichment, developed from Lord Mansfield’s judgment in Moses v Macferlan (1760) 2 Burr 1005, 97 ER 676 via the misconceived implied contract theory, and retained the equitable principles which originally underpinned restitutionary claims? But that question can be answered without resort to fictional speculation. The answer is to be found in Australia. The most recent decision of the High Court of Australia in Australian Financial Services and Leasing Pty Ltd v Hills Industries Ltd [2014] HCA 14 reveals the nature of this counter-factual (from an English perspective) anti-unjust enrichment, pro-Equity world (see also Elise Bant’s post here). But when that world is investigated rather more rigorously this law of restitution is, to mix the literary allusions, nothing more than Hans Christian Andersen’s Emperor, albeit one who thinks he is wearing old clothes, but he is actually wearing nothing at all. Continue reading