Private Law Theory

INTRODUCTION
The law of money is only partially theorized and poorly understood, as illustrated by a recent notorious case in which neither the Second Circuit Court of Appeals nor the litigants appreciated money’s most fundamental characteristic. A functioning currency requires that money be almost perfectly negotiable and payments final. Once one pays money, one almost always loses all property rights in it. One may or may not have an in personam right to money damages against the recipient, but one rarely has the in rem right of replevin to recover the payment. One limited exception to this rule is the doctrine of payment by mistake …

Jeanne L Schroeder, When Money Isn’t Money: The Second Circuit’s Gutting of the Discharge-For-Value Defense for Erroneous Payments, 27 University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law 503 (2025).