This article examines a variety of legal systems with a view to assessing the role currently played within each of them by the principle of unjust enrichment. By focusing on the characteristic features of unjust enrichment claims it seeks to demonstrate that, although there are significant differences between the ways in which different countries handle such claims, there is also much that those systems have in common. While under the common law the principle of unjust enrichment has endured a long struggle for recognition, in civil law systems it has been acknowledged for centuries. This may be because in civil law countries the principle has been expected to play only a residual, and therefore non-threatening, role in the law of obligations while in common law countries it has been called upon, if at all, to serve as the basis for the whole of the law of restitution. We should not assume, however, that all common law systems share one set of characteristics while all civil law systems share another. In some respects there is more in common between systems drawn from each category than there is between systems drawn from the same category. Mixed legal systems, as one might expect, tend to display characteristics drawn from both.

religious practices. If practices affect only the volunteer adherents of that religion they should not be legally objectionable. On the contrary, for the sake of a healthy, pluralistic society the law should go out of its way to tolerate diversity and non-conformity. It is when the religious practices of one group come into conflict with the practices, or lack of them, of another that societies can experience difficulties. In today's world the contexts in which these conflicts usually occur are education, family life and church/State relations. In the field of education the conflict is often about whether a religious practice should be tolerated within a State school environment (e.g. the wearing of head-* Professor of Law, University of Ulster. I am indebted to The'rese Murphy, Lecturer in Law at the University of Nottingham, for invaluable comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Needless to say, responsibility for the views Anally expressed, and for any errors, remains mine alone.

UNTIL now the legal system of West Germany has regulated its private international law on the basis of a small number of statutory provisions and a great deal of case law. Since the founding of the Republic in 1949, many efforts have been made to reduce the subject to a compact written code, but all to no avail. In the past few years, however, the country has seen its German-speaking neighbours make considerable progress on this front 1 and at long last it too seems to be on the point of enacting a reforming statute. The purpose of this article is to explain how the new statute will affect both the form and the substance of the pre-existing law. I. THE BACKGROUND TO THE REFORM DISSATISFACTION with the present law has arisen for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it is in an extremely untidy state. When the German Civil Code was being drafted in the 1880s and 1890s, most lawyers involved in the project wanted to include some paragraphs devoted to private international law. 2 These would not have contained provisions on when German courts were to take jurisdiction in international cases, or on when they were to recognise foreign judgments, but they would have set out choice-of-law rules. Unfortunately the civil servants in the Foreign Office of the Second Empire would not agree to this proposal. They viewed the conflict of laws as a branch of general international law and wanted to develop it on the basis of interstate treaties. The eventually accepted compromise was to enact, not in the Civil Code itself but in the statute "introducing" the Code, a set of provisions indicating when the Civil Code was to apply in cases involving non-German * Lecturer in Law, The Queen's University of Belfast. I wish to thank the German Academic Exchange Service for enabling me to carry out the research for this article while participating in its Younger Lawyers'

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