With the third edition of this well-known text, the English law of restitution can properly celebrate its majority. Since the first appearance of the book in 1965, restitution has steadily gained recognition as a legitimate offspring of the common law—a creature in its own right, standing alongside tort and contract in the family of civil obligation.

The subject-matter with which it deals—rights to recover money and other valuable benefits where they have been acquired as the result of some mistake, misrepresentation or other wrongdoing, oppression or other compulsion, breakdown of contractual relationship, and so on—can be seen as species of the genus unjust enrichment, and it is this fundamental idea which gives Goff and Jones its analytic thrust. There are still English lawyers who are not willing to admit its basic perception. Their reluctance seems to express a Darwinian fear that recognition of the new category will reduce the vitality of the genus contract, at least in that form which gives primacy to consensual obligation and resists the imposition of obligation from outside. To those of such a persuasion, Goff and Jones ought to provide a considerable measure of reassurance. The book does not argue that cases should be pleadable in terms merely of “unjust enrichment”. While it does seek to derive a number of (mostly limiting) generalizations about what may characterize an “enrichment” and make it “unjust”, the bulk of the work is taken up with analysis of much more precise conditions which have evolved to determine the scope of the main forms of recovery already mentioned.

Readers of this Quarterly who are not yet attuned to thinking in the restitutionary mode should realize its close harmony with many aspects of commercial law and practice. It covers material which will be familiar under other classifications: consequences of breakdown of contract, deployment of the constructive trust to provide preferential recovery over other creditors, subrogation to rights of others and claims of similar character in equity, breaches of fiduciary duty and confidence—to mention but a random selection. To consider them as being, by type, claims to rectify unjust enrichment is to provide a framework of thought which may allow sensible solutions to the root issue of how far it is desirable to go in providing relief.

Even more striking is how much of the material being added to the subject occurs in a commercial context: a bank mistakenly credits the account of another bank with a payment of $2 million; another bank pays a building firm on a client’s cheque that has been stopped; the arrangements for a major Hong Kong share sale are alleged to involve the economic duress of a threatened breach of contract, the cargo of a ship wrecked in the South China Sea is taken to Manila and kept without any adequate contract about storage charges. The press-