Restitution and Relationships

Abstract

This Essay examines how restitutionary doctrines protect the integrity of certain types of relationships by providing guarantees against betrayal of trust and by making free-riding a losing proposition. It also considers contexts wherein restitution serves to recruit third parties, meaning parties external to the relationship the law seeks to safeguard, as indirect guardians. More broadly, this Essay challenges the schism between autonomy-based and utility-based accounts of restitution or of private law more generally, and explains how a pluralist theory may help to address this flaw.