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I think it was in other ways an issue of timing. Restitution/Unjust Enrichment was very prominent at the time and practitioners seemed to have become increasingly aware of the potential in the subject and of their ignorance of it. Oh, and Peter Birks was involved in the revision of the list.

FDR

On Thu, November 1, 2007 10:17 pm, Charles Mitchell wrote:

Dear Gerhard

I believe that 'restitution' made it onto the list of core subjects in January 1995, when the Law Society and Council for Legal Education issued an announcement to the Law Schools, replacing the outlines of the then 6 core subjects with outlines of 7 core subjects (the new 7th subject was EU law), and rejigging the old outlines for contract and tort with:

OBLIGATIONS I

The foundations governing the formation and enforceability of contracts, together with their performance and discharge, including the remedies available to parties and the doctrine of privity. An outline of the law of restitution.

  

OBLIGATIONS II

The foundations of tortious liability (including vicarious and joint liability) and the remedies in respect of torts (including damages). There should be a sufficient study of the major torts (such as negligence, nuisance, intentional interference with the person and defamation) to exemplify the application of the general principles and the defences, and to familiarise the student with the principal torts and their constituent elements.

As far as I'm aware very few UK law schools pay any attention at all to the final sentence of Obligations I, and the very few who do stick an hour's lecture or two covering the whole field at the end of their contract lecture series. I am unaware of any attempts by the Law Society or CLE or anyone else to enforce the requirement. The politics driving the 1995 announcement were unease among the professions at the perceived shortcomings of law programmes delivered by post-1992 universities and others. Whatever the rights and wrongs of that, tweaking the syllabus by adding UE doesn't seem to have made much difference! There's a comment by Peter Birks.