This tightly edited and well-produced book, from a small but energetic publishing house, comprises 10 papers (most of which were presented at a Society of Public Teachers of Law Restitution Seminar in September 1997) and a lengthy survey style paper by Peter Birks, specially prepared to canvass more broadly some of the implications of the range of issues raised in the seminar papers. Although, as the title indicates, the book’s audience is most likely to be specialists in restitution and banking law, there is much of considerable interest and importance in this collection for a much wider readership. In particular, those who perhaps regard themselves as equity specialists will find several matters of moment discussed in a number of the essays. As Francis Rose states in his Preface, the essays do not set out to survey the entire range of connections between the law of restitution and the law and practice of banking. The book is not, therefore, a comprehensive manual. Rather, the essays, all written by established and able scholars and practitioners, examine in considerable detail a few of the more obvious and pressing connection.

Justice van Zyl, from South Africa, examines the problem of a bank’s payment to a third party payee in respect of a cheque drawn on it by a customer, but where the payment is unauthorized (the cheque having been forged or countermanded). He applauds the restitutionary approach taken by Robert Goff, J., in Barclays Bank Plc v. W.J. Simms, Son & Cooke (Southern) Ltd [1980] Q.B. 677, where it was accepted that the bank could recover the payment from the third party payee subject to any relevant defence raised by the payee, notably change of position. That approach, as the judge’s paper shows, has been doubted in South Africa, and he accordingly mounts a critical analysis of the South African approach. Justice van Zyl would extend the potential of restitutionary recovery by the bank. He suggests, without developing the argument fully, that an alternative claim might be raised against the bank’s customer to the extent that the latter has actually been enriched as a result of the unauthorized payment to the third party. Birks, in his overview, discusses some of the difficulties in the path of this suggestion. It can usefully be added that the matter has received some brief discussion in New Zealand following a rushed decision by a High Court judge, in a case with rather bizarre facts: Westpac Banking Corp. v. Rae [1992] 1 N.Z.L.R. 338, discussed by Struan Scott [1993] N.Z. Recent L.R. 232, Peter Watts [1993] N.Z. Recent L.R. 248, and Charles Rickett (1994) 16 N.Z.U.L.R. 105, 127-132.

Charles Mitchell’s paper is titled “Distributing the Burden of Alternative Co-extensive Liabilities: Some Banking Cases Considered”. He discusses whether a plaintiff should be permitted to accumulate the recoveries available from two persons liable to her, and, if not, how a decision should be made on whether one or both those liable persons should bear the burden of paying out