Noah Feldman, Columnist

A Fascinating Case About Paying a $900 Million Debt by Mistake

The Citi-Revlon overpayment lawsuit tests competing legal principles.

December 10, 2020 at 11:00 AM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

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The $900 million Citi-Revlon lawsuit that started on Wednesday is a law professor’s dream. The case, which is being heard by Judge Jesse Furman in federal district court in New York, pits two entirely logical and reasonable principles against one another. On the one hand is the idea that if someone pays you money by mistake, you should give it back. On the other is the intuition that if someone owes you money and transfers it to you — whether by Venmo or by a direct bank transfer — you should be able to keep what you are owed.

But what if someone owes you a whole lot of money and, when he means to transfer just the interest payment to you, he accidentally repays the whole debt?