Andrew Botterell

In broad outline, the chapter proceeds as follows. As indicated above, the Voluntary Act Principle has two components. The first part, the act component, claims that criminal liability can be imposed on an accused only for the performance of an act. The second part, the voluntariness component, claims that criminal liability can be imposed on an accused only for the voluntary performance of an act. I will argue that both components of the Voluntary Act Principle are in need of amendment. I will first indicate why I think the act component of the Voluntary Act Principle is in tension with the criminal law’s own conception of the necessary conditions for criminal liability, and suggest a relatively simple fix. I will then argue that what is really at work in the voluntariness component of the Voluntary Act Principle is not so much voluntariness but rather what some authors have called the practical agency condition. In making my argument I will appeal to Harry Frankfurt’s hierarchical account of the will in the hopes of illuminating what it means for an action to belong to an agent, and thus, what it means for an agent to be responsible for something she has done.

In this paper I reconsider the relation between property and unjust enrichment and respond to a recent argument that actions in unjust enrichment cannot be actions in corrective justice. I suggest that any analysis that regards actions in unjust enrichment as embodying principles of corrective justice requires supplementation by considerations that are, at bottom, proprietary in nature. I argue that there is no incompatibility in viewing actions in unjust enrichment as actions whose grounds are broadly proprietary in nature; that understanding unjust enrichment in this manner does not threaten its theoretical coherence; and that understanding unjust enrichment in this manner allows us to view actions in unjust enrichment as actions in corrective justice