Unjust Enrichment and Public Policy

ongoing

The basic maxim of the law of unjust enrichment states that a person should not be unjustly enriched at another’s expense. This broad principle is currently primarily used to solve local problems and disputes between specific individuals through private litigation. The proposed project offers a paradigm shift and the use of the fundamental principle prohibiting unjust enrichment to solve broad societal issues, both as a private and a public law doctrine. This is a double paradigm shift. From the direction of the law of unjust enrichment, it requires a reconceptualization of this area of law, to adjust it to solve entirely new types of problems. From the direction of public law, it offers to refresh the way we currently look at deep societal ills such as global warming, the spread of fake news or the production of harmful goods and services. In all these contexts, and many others, current legal frameworks tend to focus on the harmfulness of certain activities. The proposed framework offers, instead, to start the analysis with undeserved and ill-obtained gains. Phenomena like global warming and fake news are problematic because they are harmful, but persistent, and so difficult to regulate, because they are immensely beneficial to strong interest groups. A regulatory perspective focusing on gains can therefore prove instrumental in fighting some of the most important legal battles of our time. This paradigm shift involves a broad project and requires a multistage research program, conducted by the PI together with a team of post-doctoral researchers. This is a high-risk high reward project; if successful, it can provide critically missing elements in the legal toolkit, that will improve our ability to solve pressing legal issues.