This article examines how the jurisdictional rules of the recast of the Brussels I Regulation, namely the rules of exclusive jurisdiction for immovable property and company law and governance matters and the rules of special jurisdiction for contracts and torts, deal with unjust enrichment claims and issues concerning unjust enrichment. It also asks whether a new special jurisdiction rule for unjust enrichment should be added to the Regulation.

In a famous act of studied neutrality the framers of the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPS)1 left nations adhering to the Agreement completely free, in Article 6 of that document, to determine the extent to which they would allow the parallel importation of products affected by intellectual property rights which had been lawfully placed on the market outside the jurisdiction.2 The hands off approach embodied in Article 6 came as no surprise to commentators and TRIPS watchers. What to do about parallel importing has always been an issue which has deeply divided the world's trading nations and continues to be the subject of vigorous debate within them.3 Intellectual property owners and their licensees are uniting across national borders not just to defend historically entrenched advantages but also to portray these advantages as so much a part of the post TRIPS order that their extension (at home as well as abroad) seems both natural and inevitable. Importers and would-be importers outside existing distribution networks not unnaturally remain sceptical of arguments which threaten to replace tariffs and import restrictions with private law barriers to entry, barriers backed by both civil and criminal sanctions. In Australia and New Zealand these self-interested opponents of parallel importing have, in recent years, been joined in their scepticism by competition regulators and policy makers eager to bring to bear on the debate economic insights derived from detailed analyses of the impact of such restrictions both on particular product markets and the national economy as a whole. Increasingly too, the wider consuming public has begun to see that grey markets have charms hitherto invisible behind now removed protectionist walls.

New technologies bring new problems as well as benefits. New technologies also involve unknown dangers and fears. So it is with biotechnology and living modified organisms (LMOs).

The twelfth edition of Dicey & Morris, The Conflict of Laws (hereafter Dicey & Morris) appeared in 1993 under the general editorship of Dr Lawrence Collins and with Professors Trevor C. Hartley, J. D. McClean and C. G. J. Morse as specialist editors. It has since been updated by a yearly cumulative supplement; the latest is from 1997. The book takes in the whole province of private international law and is rich in material and ideas. It shows how English lawyers have reacted to the outside world without forgetting that the conflict of laws has an international character. Its students consider it to be a noble science. As Arthur Nussbaum said, the student of private international law “feels himself, as it were, a member of an international community of learning. He will have to study foreign legal ideas and will thereby obtain insight into the variety and interplay of heterogeneous legal concepts and ideas all over the world.”