In this article, Professor Steve Hedley offers a Common Law response to he recently published arguments of Professor Nils Jansen on the German law of unjustified enrichment (as to which, see Jansen, “Farewell to Unjustified Enrichment” (2016) 20 EdinLR 123). The author takes the view that Jansen's paper provided a welcome opportunity to reconsider not merely what unjust enrichment can logically be, but what it is for. He argues that unjust enrichment talk contributes little of value, and that the supposedly logical process of stating it at a high level of abstraction, and then seeking to deduce the law from that abstraction, merely distracts lawyers from the equities of the cases they consider.
