Law Commons^™

Revaluing Restitution: From The Talmud To Postsocialism (Reviewing Hanoch Dagan's Unjust Enrichment), Michael Heller, Christopher Serkin

Faculty Scholarship

Whatever happened to the study of restitution? Once a core private law subject along with property, torts and contracts, restitution has receded from American legal scholarship. Hanoch Dagan's book "Unjust Enrichment: A Study of Private Law and Public Values" threatens to reverse the tide and make restitution interesting again. The book shows how we can examine commonplace words such as "value" and "gain" to extract the core social values embedded in the private law. The technicalities of unjust enrichment reveal compelling stories about property, personhood, and national ethos. In our review, we put Dagan's jurisprudential approach to the ...