The Doctrine of Free Acceptance - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages The judicial acceptance of the concept through the years has been less than overwhelming. The farthest it has reached, according to Hedley is this: a considerable number of judges now recognize that there is an important subject called restitution and that in general terms, it concerns the removal of benefits that would otherwise unjustly enrich the defendant.

It is not difficult to imagine that jurisprudence surrounding the much more limited principle of free acceptance is even narrower. To aspire for universality or even, less ambitiously, coherence would be a futile exercise. The only discernible trend is, as Hedley somewhat cynically puts it, “the willingness to make quite spectacular changes in the law when the judge’s moral feelings are sufficiently outraged.”

What this paper will attempt to do is to present a comparative overview of free acceptance, and to some extent, unjust enrichment, as it is applied in common law jurisdictions. By way of providing some form of context, it will also explore how the common law countries perceive these two principles, as opposed to civil law countries. The jury is still out on the question of what the future holds for these two intertwined doctrines, dependent as it largely is on the vagaries of the legal system and the constantly-shifting winds of judicial discernment and discretion.

II. Free Acceptance Not Freely Accepted: A Review of Scholarly Studies
To quote Birks, “A free acceptance occurs where a recipient knows that a benefit is being offered to him non-gratuitously and where he, having the opportunity to reject, elects to accept.” It is an alternative to incontrovertible benefit that cannot be disputed by the defendants, as in benefits that have accrued due to a clear and unmistakable meeting of the minds. Birks proceeds from Goff and Jones who first propounded the idea of subjectively-determined benefit.

The most famous example of free acceptance is of a window cleaner who cleaned the windows of a homeowner, the homeowner is fully aware that the window cleaner believed that he was performing the service for valuable consideration and yet doing nothing to stop the cleaner from cleaning the windows. ...Download file to see next pages Read More