The South African Law of Unjustified Enrichment by Jacques Du Plessis (Copy)

ISBN: 9781485153184

2nd edition

Juta, 2025

Soft Cover, 612 pages

The South African Law of Unjustified Enrichment sets out the principles governing the general requirements of enrichment liability as well as the traditional specific enrichment actions. These actions cover a broad range of situations where someone enriched another by conferring a benefit for a purpose that failed, or by improving another’s property or paying another’s debts without authorisation, or where someone was enriched by infringing another’s rights. Since the first edition of this work there has been greater judicial recognition of the general principles of enrichment liability and a decreasing interest in the identification of specific enrichment actions. These developments have increased the risk of the general requirements for enrichment liability being treated as free-floating concepts that may be resorted to whenever it is felt that duties of restitution must be imposed. The second edition seeks to address this challenge, and also engages with developments in the law relating to the unwinding of contracts, undoing the consequences of fraud and theft, and locating enrichment liability in its broader constitutional and statutory context. Over 400 new judgments, as well as major developments in foreign law are considered.