  We review the construction of the universal Hamilton-Jacobi counterterm for
dilaton gravity in two dimensions, derive the corresponding result in the
Cartan formulation and elaborate further upon black hole thermodynamics and
semi-classical corrections. Applications include spherically symmetric black
holes in arbitrary dimensions with Minkowski- or AdS-asymptotics, the BTZ black
hole and black holes in two-dimensional string theory.

High Energy Physics - Theory;General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology