Question

In eighteenth-century English jurisprudence, the formalistic common-law writ of indebitatus assumpsit—which historically required proof of an express or implied agreement to pay a debt—faced growing pressure to accommodate claims where no genuine assent existed between the parties, yet where one party retained money that rightfully belonged to another. In the landmark 1760 decision Moses v. Macferlan, Lord Mansfield fundamentally reoriented this doctrine by ruling that an action for 'money had and received' could lie even in the absence of any consensual agreement, resting instead on the premise that the defendant was obligated by natural justice and equity to refund the money. Mansfield's formulation gave rise to what modern legal theorists categorize as 'quasi-contract' or restitutionary liability based on unjust enrichment. However, subsequent nineteenth-century English jurists, uncomfortable with Mansfield's reliance on broad equitable principles within a common-law court, attempted to subsume quasi-contractual remedies under the traditional framework of contract law by introducing the doctrine of the 'implied contract'—a legal fiction positing that the law imputed an imaginary promise by the defendant to repay. While this conceptual maneuver preserved the formal boundary between contract and equity, it obscured the substantive distinction between consensual obligations (rooted in the parties' mutual intent) and restitutionary obligations (imposed by law irrespective of intent to prevent an inequitable benefit).

Based on the passage, which of the following statements regarding nineteenth-century English jurists' approach to restitutionary claims can most reasonably be inferred?