Online research in philosophy

It is controversial what needs to be proved in order to benefit from the presumption of resulting trusts, whether all resulting trusts arise by operation of law, and whether resulting trusts are restitutionary or not. The author shows that a claimant need not prove an absence of consideration before benefitting from the presumption, and argues that, whilst presumed resulting trusts respond to intention, they arise by operation of law. Finally, the author argues that one argument for a restitutionary analysis of resulting trusts, i.e. that a transferor cannot retain a beneficial interest in property title to which he has transferred, is misconceived.

There are two ways of viewing tort law in the debate over reparations for racial crimes. First - and most commonly - tort law is seen as a way of providing relief through courts. So Reparations Talk begins by exploring the requirements for lawsuits for reparations for slavery and for the Jim Crow era. It suggests some instances where lawsuits might be appropriate, such as riots, lynchings, and segregated libraries, and limited cases involving slavery. Tort doctrine also offers, however, a way of framing discussions of moral culpability. Reparations Talk, thus, moves beyond lawsuits to discuss some ways that tort law and unjust enrichment doctrine might be used to think about issues in reparations, such as how should claims by descendants of slaves be evaluated? How do we treat issues of causation across generations? It suggests several damages formulas as starting points for contemplating legislative reparations. Reparations talk concludes that, although it may be difficult to compute the exact amount of harm or to figure out where current generations would be without the crimes of slavery and Jim Crow, that discussion of reparations may benefit from the clarity that contemporary legal doctrine can bring to the subject, even as we struggle to define the precise goals of reparations.

Herman Melville’s Billy Budd presents a classic example of a legal official legally required to enforce a law he believes or knows to be unjust. Although there has been considerable discussion of a citizen’s moral duty to obey unjust laws, there has been little consideration of a legalofficial’s duty to enforce unjust laws.In this paper I take the central moral dilemma of the novel -- a legal official’s moral duty to enforce a valid law of a legal system vs. his moral duty not to do or to contribute to injustice -- and discuss various moral considerations that would bear on this dilemma. By doing this I hope to contribute both to the moral issues involved as weIl as, to some extent, the literary criticism with regard to Billy Budd.

Restitution lawyers commonly speak of the 'transfer' of value; this is misconceived. Values are realised, not transferred, only property rights are transferred. This realisation distinctly illuminates the relationship between the law of restitution and the law of tracing, strongly suggesting that trusts of traceable proceeds are not examples of restitutionary entitlements which reverse unjust enrichments.

In a 2004 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada restated the law of unjust enrichment as it exists in the common law provinces of Canada. Unjust enrichment is said to arise where there is 'no juristic reason' for the defendant's enrichment and the plaintiff's corresponding deprivation. This appears to mark a movement away from the traditional common law approach, which answers the question whether an enrichment is unjust by reference to primary facts such as mistake, compulsion or undue influence. The new Canadian approach appears to bear some similarity to civilian legal systems, which may frame the inquiry according to whether the enrichment was supported by some legal justification, such as a contractual or other obligation. Through a comparative approach, the author shows that no legal system is actually thoroughly committed to an analysis of this kind; when deciding whether an enrichment is unjust, all systems look sometimes to the primary facts, and sometimes to justification through legal constructs like contracts. The author shows that if the new Canadian approach is to be made workable, it will require further elaboration in a number of directions.

Left-libertarianism, like the more familiar right-libertarianism, holds that agents initially fully own themselves. Unlike right-libertarianism, however, it views natural resources as belonging to everyone in some egalitarian manner. Left-libertarianism is thus a form of liberal egalitarianism. In this article, I shall lay out the reasons why (1) left-libertarianism holds that (a) private discrimination is not intrinsically unjust and (b) it is intrinsically unjust for the state to prohibit private discrimination, and (2) that, nonetheless, a plausible version of left-libertarianism holds that it is unjust for the state (and many private individuals) to take no steps to offset the negative effects of systematic private discrimination. The basic line is not new. It is simply that there is nothing unjust in principle with private discrimination, but there is (at least typically) something unjust about doing nothing to promote equal life prospects.