On Some Issues of the Legal Regulation of Unjust Enrichment Obligations

Introduction: the paper discusses the issues of the legal regulation of obligations arising from unjust enrichment; in particular, it discusses the opinion on an excessively wide list of grounds for the occurrence of unjust enrichment obligations, which blurs their civil nature. The author disputes the opinion that unjust enrichment may also arise in connection with the seizure of property from a person as a result of a crime or administrative misconduct, since, in the author’s opinion, the concepts of “unjust” and “illegal” are not identical. In addition, the author argues that the object that creates unjust enrichment, the source of its increment, can be not only materialized objects but also other income-generating objects of civil relations. The purpose of the paper, first of all, is to study the legal terminology used by the legislator as a lexical basis for the legal regulation of unjust enrichment obligations, in terms of analyzing the correctness of its logical and semantic content and the ability to reflect all the variety of elements and dynamics of obligations arising from unjust enrichment. The main research methods are the methods of comparative jurisprudence and the logical methods of text research, which allow establishing the relationship of terms within the concept, as well as the method of legal hermeneutics used to interpret the meaning of the civil legislation norms. The result of the study is the author’s conclusions about the need to expand the list of sources of unjust enrichment and the possibility of attributing to them unrealized objects of civil relations; in addition, the author proposes a new definition of the term “enrichment.” The field of application of the results should be recognized as subsequent research works on the stated topic, in which the conclusions drawn in the paper can be used as a theoretical basis, as well as the content of the paper can be recommended for study in the courses of private law. Conclusions: the author has established that the legal nature of unjust enrichment obligations is not limited exclusively to subsidiary nature in relation to tort obligations. In modern private law, they may also have an independent character; the unreasonableness of enrichment does not always mean its illegality, and enrichment itself may consist not only in obtaining income in the form of cash but also in other ways of adding to the wealth of the acquirer.