ABSTRACT
The inspiration for this chapter comes from what, for convenience, I will call ‘taxonomy scholarship’, by which I mean that species of legal scholarship concerned with the classification or divisions of the legal system. In modern times, taxonomy scholarship originates, essentially, in the advocacy of the recognition of the restitutionary obligation following the publication of Professor Birks’ magisterial Introduction to the Law of Restitution in 1985.1 This scholarship is not limited solely to the identification and recasting of restitutionary obligations, but seeks to discover an overall taxonomy for the common law, of which the law of obligations forms only a small part.2
