When Anthony Hazell, district auditor for Hammersmith and Fulham LBC, pursued his enquiries into the Council’s activities in the interest rate swaps market, little can he have anticipated that the ensuing litigation would trouble the House of Lords on no less than four occasions, as well as producing numerous decisions of the lower courts. Still less might he have imagined that the judicial and academic fallout of the first House of Lords’ decision in Hazell v. Hammersmith and Fulham LBC [1992] 2 A.C. 1, that all interest rate swap transactions entered into by local authorities were ultra vires their powers under the Local Government Act 1972, would merit a seminar at Oxford University and the publication of a collection of essays debating the effect of the “swaps litigation” upon English law.

While a cynical onlooker might observe that the most telling instruction from the events of the past decade is that litigation remains a drawn out and expensive process (echoing the comments of Leggatt, L.J., in Kleinwort Benson v. Glasgow CC [1996] Q.B. 678, 692), Lessons of the Swaps Litigation will be of interest not only to followers of the fortunes of the law of restitution (with which it is principally concerned) but also, for example, to those interested in the legal framework of financial markets and future legal historians. The enthusiasm of those who gathered for the second Mansfield Symposium at All Souls College in 1997 has been reflected in this work, papers from the symposium being supplemented by additional material including Nicholas Bamforth’s analysis of the public law implications of Hazell, a notable absentee from the original debate.

Of the 13 papers in the book, 11 concern issues familiar to those regularly grappling with the realm of “unjust enrichment”. At the heart of these is Ewan McKendrick’s chapter, containing an overview of the possible grounds for restitution of payments made under void swap contracts. That analysis is supplemented by other papers focusing on particular “unjust factors” (for example Eoin O’Dell on “incapacity”), defences (for example Michael Jewell’s comparative analysis of the change of position defence) and related issues. It would be wrong, however, to label the latter as “side issues” because three, namely property (the subject of William Swadling’s paper), interest (Francis Rose) and conflict of laws (Robert Stevens) merited consideration by the House of Lords in their own right (see Westdeutsche Landesbank v. Islington LBC [1996] A.C. 669; Kleinwort Benson v. Glasgow CC [1999] A.C. 153).

Of the other papers, Hubert Picarda’s chapter on “Contract and tort” seems incongruous. Issues of contract or tort law rarely troubled the English courts during the swaps litigation, notable exceptions in the contractual sphere being Hazell and the decision on gaming contracts in Morgan Grenfell v. Welwyn Hatfield DC [1995] 1 All E.R. 1. The title and content of this chapter is, therefore, curious. In particular the discussion of Bankers Trust v. PT Dharmala [1996] C.L.C. 518, a case of alleged derivative mis-selling, seems wholly out of place. The remainder of the chapter focuses largely on issues of restitution, many already covered, only rarely delving into the

171