There is at present something of a schism between restitution scholars. There are those who maintain that restitution may arise as a response, inter alia, to rights in rem and there are those who maintain that it may not. At one level, this is a debate about the internal boundaries of the law of restitution, principally about whether restitution arises exclusively as a response to the principle of unjust enrichment, or whether it may also arise as a response to a number of other causes of action. More fundamentally, however, the schism rests on a difference of view as to whether it is logically and conceptually possible to say that a right in rem is an event that gives rise to or generates other rights, such as to have the asset restored, to have restitution made, or to be compensated for loss suffered, or whether a right in rem can only ever arise as itself a response to other events.

Where a testator died before 1 January 1983, there was no general power for a court to rectify his will. The Courts of Equity had, by tradition, the power to rectify documents inter partessuch as conveyanceswhich did not accurately record what had been agreed by those who were parties to them. This power of rectification applied also to voluntary settlements, where a settlor could obtain rectification by proving that the settlement did not represent his true intention. But, for reasons which are not clear, it had become generally accepted that the equitable doctrine of rectification did not apply to wills.