This article is concerned with the question whether a defendant in an unjust enrichment action can reduce or eliminate its liability by establishing that it could have obtained the enrichment (or part of it) from the claimant in a way that would not have given rise to liability. The answer in principle ought to be no. In arguing for that conclusion, I consider the meaning of “enrichment” and “loss”, the nature of the change of position defence and the basis of liability for unjust enrichment in cases involving ultra vires charges by public authorities and the taking of money without consent by private defendants.

This article addresses the doctrine of remoteness in tort in light of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Armstead v Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance Co. Ltd. Armstead further attenuates an already weak control on tortious liability. In outline, it does so in two ways: first, by establishing that contractual liabilities incurred as a result of tortiously caused property damage comprise non-remote damage provided that those liabilities represent a reasonable pre-estimate of the counterparty’s loss; and, secondly, by allocating the burden of proof in respect of remoteness to defendants. This article explores these rules. It contends, in particular, that the first collides with the fundamental principle that the extent of the claimant’s loss in tort is irrelevant to the issue of remoteness while the second means that, oddly, the onus of proof in relation to remoteness in tort differs from that in contract.

The Damna Usuum was a series of complaints about the operation of uses written during the negotiations with the Commons which culminated in the Statute of Uses (1536). Through detailed analysis of the manuscript, this paper demonstrates that the Damna Usuum has been misunderstood by legal historians. Rather than being a public document intended to persuade the Commons to support reform; the Damna Usuum can be shown to be a series of rough notes prepared by the Crown’s lawyers ahead of their negotiations with the Commons. Furthermore, this has a significant impact on our understanding of how contemporary lawyers conceptualised pre-1536 uses in a period in which they had taken on more proprietary “thing-like” characteristics.

This article argues that the concept of dualism has ceased to operate as a reliable indicator of, or guide to, the relationships between domestic and international laws in the UK’s constitutional order. Dualism, it is argued, provides only a partial account of the complex interactions between domestic and international laws, cannot accommodate the hybrid products of interactions with European legal orders and ignores the post-“incorporation” processes of domestication through which international and domestic norms are reconciled. The connections between domestic and international laws are – in contrast to dualism’s binary simplicity – multi-dimensional and interconnected with the UK’s (recently turbulent) constitutional politics.