Ward Farnsworth

Andrew Kull

Restitution is a body of law that has immense practical value and wide application to disputes of all sorts. Simply put, it is the set of rules that govern recovery of gains that a party should not keep—or “unjust enrichment,” as it is formally called; and unjust enrichment occurs every day in both private and commercial transactions. Restitution has the dual distinction of being one of the most useful but overlooked bodies of law, due to its lack of study by several generations of modern lawyers. Without a single casebook in print on the subject, it has been nearly impossible to teach restitution law in the past. Restitution and Unjust Enrichment: Cases and Notes fills that void and presents the substance, remedies and history of restitution in a practical and interesting manner. Professors and students will benefit from: The only casebook available for teaching this important and interesting subject, and the first new one in 50 years. A modern reworking of the topic that adopts the framework of Publication of Restatement Third, Restitution and Unjust Enrichment (2011) (“R3RUE”) for teaching purposes. A complete discussion of Restitution, which is part of the required curriculum for students who receive legal training in other parts of the common-law world. Authorship by leading scholars in the field. Andrew Kull was the sole Reporter for R3RUE, published in two hardcover volumes. Ward Farnsworth is the author of a convenient treatise on Restitution, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2014. He is also co-author of the Wolters Kluwer casebook Torts: Cases and Questions, currently in its second edition.

Cases and Notes

Restitution and Unjust Enrichment

From 1840 to 1960 the profoundest claim of Americans who fought the institution of segregation was that the government had no business sorting citizens by the color of their skin. During these years the moral and political attractiveness of the antidiscrimination principle made it the ultimate legal objective of the American civil rights movement. Yet, in the contemporary debate over the politics and constitutional law of race, the vital theme of antidiscrimination has been largely suppressed. Thus a strong line of argument laying down one theoretical basis for the constitutional protection of civil rights has been lost. Andrew Kull provides us with the previously unwritten history of the color-blind idea. From the arguments of Wendell Phillips and the Garrisonian abolitionists, through the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment and Justice Harlan's famous dissent in Plessy, civil rights advocates have consistently attempted to locate the antidiscrimination principle in the Constitution. The real alternative, embraced by the Supreme Court in 1896, was a constitutional guarantee of reasonable classification. The government, it said, had the power to classify persons by race so long as it acted reasonably; the judiciary would decide what was reasonable. In our own time, in Brown v. Board of Education and the decisions that followed, the Court nearly avowed the rule of color blindness that civil rights lawyers continued to assert; instead, it veered off for political and tactical reasons, deciding racial cases without stating constitutional principle. The impoverishment of the antidiscrimination theme in the Court's decision prefigured the affirmative action shift in the civil rights agenda. The social upheaval of the 1960s put the color-blind Constitution out of reach for a quartercentury or more; but for the hard choices still to be made in racial policy, the colorblind tradition of civil rights retains both historical and practical significance.

Andrew Kull

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