Restitutionary Remedies in Three-Party Cases: A Comparative Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
obligation owed by the defendant to the claimant which is constituted by dealings with third parties which have generated a profit in the hands of the defendant.Though one could obviously characterize these as "three-party" situations, in the sense that the source of the defendant's unjust enrichment is a third party, I will not do so for present purposes on the basis that these are situations in which the unjust retention directly results from the wrongdoing of the defendant who has breached a duty owed to the plaintiff.The present topic concerns three-party situations in a rather different sense.These are situations where a third party has transferred value to the defendant, which, for reasons of justice, ought to have been or should now be transferred to the plaintiff.As we shall see, such cases may or may not involve wrongful conduct by the third party.Where the value has been transferred to the defendant, however, the plaintiff might be said to have a better claim to the enrichment than does the defendant.These types of cases are much less discussed in the literature and, I suspect, much less familiar to the profession at large.Nonetheless, there are, both historically and in contemporary circumstances, many cases of this kind and their proper resolution as a matter of some interest.This paper will examine the traditional English position concerning such claims and contrast that doctrine with more recent developments in American and Canadian restitutionary doctrine.The principal point of comparison is that American and Canadian doctrine allows restitutionary relief in a much broader range of three-party cases.With particular reference to Canadian doctrine, it is of interest that there appear to be a substantial number of Canadian cases providing relief in situations quite similar to those found in American law.This appears to be the case notwithstanding the fact that there is no obvious evidence of American influence in the sense of reliance on American authorities in the development of Canadian law in three-party cases.A complication found in Canadian law finds no parallel in American doctrine and, for a time at least, threatened to preclude a recovery in at least some three-party cases.Nonetheless, a recent Supreme Court of Canada decision, Moore v. Sweet, 2 to be further considered below, has flatly rejected this possibility, and it now appears that Canadian and American doctrine run along quite similar lines.This might be considered to be some evidence in support of the proposition that there is merit in the position taken in the American and Canadian cases which, in turn, might provide a basis for reconsideration of some aspects of English doctrine.The paradigm two-party case, for pedagogical purposes at least, is the simple case of a mistaken payment.The claimant has paid money to the defendant as a result of a mistake of some kind.For centuries, the common 2 Moore v.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".