Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 10.djvu/253

227 KEENER ON QUASI-CONTRACTS, 22/ tion of the validity of his proposition. The gravity of this error should not be underestimated ; but at the same time it is but just to the author to point out that in the majority of his discussions, and even in the wording of his general principle, he has referred, implicitly or explicitly, to a logically prior principle, and that in a criticism of his work upon the merits, full account of that princi- ple should be taken. Now the sound thesis and the one upon which Professor Keener really built I conceive to be this: that there is a remedy, differing from, but alternative with, damages, granted by courts of law upon legal wrongs ; that the process of reasoning by which the right to this remedy is established varies with the original right that is violated ; but that, the remedy being established in the case of each right, it can be shown that it is quantitatively identical in all cases, and can, therefore, be conven- iently called by a single name. For this remedy restitution seems to be the most apt designation. Justice to the learned author, as we have seen, requires that in addition to the formal criticisms which have been urged against his treatise, there should be a further discussion of this thesis, and in the remaining pages of this article, therefore, I shall venture to offer a theory of restitu- tion and then to criticise the author's theory by that as a standard. What, then, is the remedy of restitution ? Everett V. Abbot, New York, 1896. (To be continued,^