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Category: Restitution

The Future of the Law of Restitution for Unjust Enrichment in Ireland

22 March, 201722 March, 2017
| 1 Comment
| Conferences, Lectures, Papers and Workshops, Restitution

Euro notes = Irish flag (notes via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_banknotes)The Private Law Discussion Group in the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin, is delighted to welcome Dr Niamh Connolly (University College London) next Thursday, 30 March 2017, at 2:00pm, in the Trinity Research in Social Sciences (TRiSS) Seminar Room, 6th floor, Arts Building, TCD (map), to give a paper on


The Future of Restitution in Ireland.

All are welcome, particularly those with a research interest in private law, unjust enrichment and restitution. This event is open to the public and free of charge. If you would like to attend, please register on Eventbrite.

Niamh Connolly (via UCL website)Dr Niamh Connolly (pictured right) is a lecturer at University College London, where she moved from Trinity College Dublin in 2016. Her principal research and teaching interest is in unjust enrichment law. She is interested in how Irish private law compares to that of England and Wales, and in differences in legal culture that affect the substantive law in these jurisdictions. Her paper will seek to interpret the sparse Irish case law on unjust enrichment in light of this wider question about the specificity of Irish law. In particular, Niamh will ask whether Irish legal culture is less formalist than that of England and Wales, and if so, how that affects Irish restitution law.…

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You can’t keep the proceeds of a bank error in your favour; and, if you do, you probably won’t be able to get out of jail free – updated

12 January, 201720 August, 2019
| 6 Comments
| Mistaken payments, Restitution

Get Out of Jail Free cardIn the board-game Monopoly, one of the cards that you can get by landing on ‘Chance’ is ‘Get out of jail free‘. If you are sent to jail during the game, you can use the card to ‘escape’ immediately, without having to cool your heels for the three turns otherwise mandated by the rules. It is as about a useful guide for life as the its fellow Monopoly ‘Community Chest’ card, which tells you that you can keep the proceeds of a bank error in your favour. Unfortunately, you can’t; and spending it is straightforward theft, as is well illustrated by a story in today’s Irish Independent:

Jail for ‘flabbergasted’ teen who succumbed to temptation after €20k was mistakenly lodged in his account

Karl Smith was due €200

A teenager who had “an incredible temptation presented to him” two days after his 19th birthday when his former employer mistakenly lodged almost €20,000 into account has been jailed for theft. …

Judge Melanie Greally sentenced Smith to four years in prison with the final two years suspended.

There is more on this case here, here, here and here. This is not the only time this kind of thing has happened, though it certainly seems to be the most unlucky defendant.…

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The Global Futures of Unjust Enrichment, 21-22 April 2017

13 October, 201613 October, 2016
| No Comments
| Restitution

Goff&JonesA conference on the theme of the Global Futures of Unjust Enrichment will be held on Friday 21 April 2017 and Saturday 22 April 2017 in the UCL Gustave Tuck Theatre, Wilkins Building, Gower Street, London WC1 (map here).

The Bentham House Conference 2017 celebrates the publication of the 50th anniversary edition of Goff & Jones: The Law of Unjust Enrichment, and honours the memory of the book’s first authors, Lord Goff of Chieveley and Professor Gareth Jones, who both died in 2016. The conference brings together leading scholars from around the world to consider the future of unjust enrichment in overseas jurisdictions, and to discuss current problems and controversies in English law.

The emergence of the law of unjust enrichment as a distinct part of the law of obligations was the most important and radical development in English private law of the last hundred years. Academic writing played a significant role in this development, and most significant of all was Robert Goff and Gareth Jones’s seminal work on the topic in 1966. The speakers paying tribute to Goff and Jones are a veritable who’s-who of contemporary private law. On Friday 21 April 2017, they will discuss the future trajectory of the law of unjust enrichment in overseas jurisdictions; and on Saturday 22 April 2017, they will consider a series of important issues which have been thrown up by the English case law over the past decade, and which will require significant further attention from the courts.…

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Overpayments by ATMs and theft from banks

26 June, 201616 September, 2020
| 5 Comments
| Mistaken payments, Restitution

Money from an ATM, via flickrIn June 2012, a massive IT failure affected all of Ulster Bank’s ATMs, and many customers sought to take advantage by making multiple withdrawals of cash which they did not have in their accounts. As I have commented many times on this blog, in the case of overactive ATMs, overpayments, and theft, a bank error in your favour is not a gift from God; an overactive ATM is not santa, and the scrooge bank will have to be repaid; bank errors are not a licence to gamble; and keeping the proceeds of a bank error in your favour can amount to theft.

However, in a recent prosecution of a man who managed to withdraw €13,600 from Ulster Bank ATMs during the IT failure, the judge dismissed the case as the prosecution failed to prove Ulster Bank did not consent to the withdrawals, and the State had failed to prove the bank existed. The defendant was charged with 23 counts of stealing cash, the property of “Ulster Bank Ireland Ltd”, and whilst there was evidence of various entities associated with Ulster Bank, the judge held that there was no documentary proof of a properly incorporated legal entity called “Ulster Bank Ireland Ltd” put before the jury, and he therefore directed the jury to acquit the defendant.…

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Postdoctoral Research Fellowship: Comparative Unjust Enrichment, Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law, Faculty of Law, McGill University

24 May, 201625 May, 2016
| No Comments
| Restitution
Publications of the Crépeau Centre

I am delighted to post this on behalf of Professor Lionel Smith:

McGill University – Faculty of Law
Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law
Postdoctoral Research Fellowship: Comparative Unjust Enrichment

The Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law intends to appoint a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with effect from August 2016 or other agreed date. The position is funded by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The principal investigator is Professor Lionel Smith, researcher at the Crépeau Centre, and the team is composed of colleagues from McGill’s Faculty of Law and beyond. The position is for one year, with the possibility of renewal for a second year.

ABOUT THE PAUL-ANDRÉ CRÉPEAU CENTRE FOR PRIVATE AND COMPARATIVE LAW
Based at McGill University in Montreal (Quebec, Canada) the Crépeau Centre is the only research centre in Canada devoted to research in fundamental private law. Quebec’s private law is civilian, but it evolves in a North American environment that is otherwise largely grounded in the common law. Quebec’s private law therefore provides a living model for the fruitful coexistence of two legal traditions, in which the ongoing interaction of the common law and the civil law is combined with the interaction of French and English in Quebec’s bilingual civil law.…

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After a challenge to ObamaCare, will there be Restitution to the Executive in the US?

12 May, 201613 May, 2016
| No Comments
| Restitution

Seal of the US House of Representatives, via WikipediaIn US House of Representatives v Burwell (pdf), US District Judge Rosemary M Collyer has today upheld the challenge of the House of Representatives to a portion of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), ruling that the government had wrongly spent billions of dollars in the past two years to reimburse insurance companies for providing health coverage at lower costs to low and moderate income consumers. There is no mention in the judgment about the recovery of the unauthorised reimbursements, but the case plainly raises that question, which I have been discussing in a series of posts (I, II, III, IV, V, & V(a)) on this blog. There is another post to come in the series, and an addendum – but the implications on Burwell are too big to postpone.

The judge set up the issue in this way:

This case involves two sections of the Affordable Care Act: 1401 and 1402. Section 1401 provides tax credits to make insurance premiums more affordable, while Section 1402 reduces deductibles, co-pays, and other means of “cost sharing” by insurers. Section 1401 was funded by adding it to a preexisting list of permanently-appropriated tax credits and refunds.

…

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Restitution to the Executive and the recovery of unauthorised State payments – V(a) – A footnote on overpaid gardaí

8 May, 201611 May, 2016
| 4 Comments
| Restitution

GardaFrom today’s Sunday Independent comes a story by Maeve Sheehan which has many echoes of an earlier story that Department of Agriculture overpayments of €70m in EU grants to farmers would not be recovered. The earlier story prompted my current series of posts (I, II, III, IV, & V) on the recovery of unauthorised State payments. Today’s story goes right to the heart of the issues I have been discussing in that series. It based on a report to the Garda Commissioner in relation to financial control released to the Sunday Independent under freedom of information legislation last week, which found that Gardaí received overpayments totalling more than €1m in pensions and salaries, and that some of these overpayments will have to be written off at the expense of the taxpayer:

Embarrassing gaffe as gardai were ‘overpaid by more than €1.1m’

… The Garda’s internal audit unit put overpayments of salaries and pensions at €1,139,014 at the end of 2014, €184,000 more than in 2013, according to a report obtained by the Sunday Independent. Less than half of the gardai who were overpaid had plans in place to repay it. The force’s internal audit unit concluded: “It is likely that write-off of some of this debt will be required but every effort is being made to recoup as much of this amount as possible.”

…

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Restitution to the Executive and the recovery of unauthorised State payments – V – unauthorised State payments must be recovered?

6 May, 201612 August, 2016
| 5 Comments
| Restitution

Last month, officials at the Illinois Department of Revenue said that there had been overpayments since 2014 totalling US$168 million to some 6,500 districts across Illinois. The Department says that it’s sensitive to the impact recovering the funds will have on the districts, and it will therefore allow them to repay the money slowly. But repay it they must, unless legislation forgives the debts. It is a stark example of the issues which I have been discussing on this blog in a series of posts on the principles underlying restitution claims made by the Executive. The series was prompted by media reports that the taxpayer has been hit with a €70m bill for overpaid farmers. In my first post in the series, I established the principle associated with Auckland Harbour Board v R [1924] AC 318; [1923] UKPC 92, [1923] NZPC 3 (18 December 1923) [Auckland] and Attorney General v Great Southern and Western Railway Company of Ireland [1925] AC 754 (HL) [GSWR]. This principle has two limbs: first, State payments must be authorised (this is the authorisation limb of the principle, which I discussed in my second and third posts); and second, unauthorised State payments can be recovered if they can be identified (this is the restitution limb of the principle, which I discussed in my fourth post).…

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