Law Commons^™

Reparations Litigation: What About Unjust Enrichment?, Margalynne J. Armstrong

Faculty Publications

This Article examines the role of unjust enrichment in substantive and remedial restitution as one option available to the movement that seeks to secure reparations for the descendants of the millions who were enslaved, transported from the African continent, and dispersed throughout the Americas and Europe. The reparations movement also seeks fitting remedies for the continuing depredations imposed upon people of African descent in the years that have followed the abolition of slavery. The substantive and remedial law of restitution, particularly the concepts of unjust enrichment and the remedy of constructive trust, provide particularly apt vehicles for reparations claims.

After …

Reparations Theory And Postcolonial Puerto Rico: Some Preliminary Thoughts, Pedro A. Malavet

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article primarily focuses on the plight of the Puerto Ricans on the island because, in addition to their flawed social construction by the United States and lack of national political power, they are also legally constructed as second-class citizens. In defining the legal rights of Puerto Ricans, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that territorial citizens are entitled to fewer constitutional protections than U.S. citizens residing in any of the fifty states. The racist and essentialist social construction of the Puerto Ricans as inassimilable, the denial of legal rights by the courts, along with the democratic deficit which deprives …