W(h)ither knowing receipt? Lionel D.

Smith the main question to be examined here is this: is knowing receipt a claim in unjust enrichment which happens to involve trust property, or is it equity's conversion? As between those two models, there are several reasons to think that knowing receipt belongs to the latter. Probably the main reason for thinking that knowing receipt is equity's conversion is the focus on proprietary rights which the claim demands. It is not concerned with currently existing proprietary rights, but a wrongful interference with such rights in the past appears to be of the essence of the claim A difficult point must finally be raised, even though it cannot be investigated here. Even if knowing receipt is equity's conversion, and properly requires some level of fault on the part of the defendant, it remains true that unjust enrichment does not require fault; so why should a trust beneficiary bother with knowing receipt at all? Why not sue the recipient of trust property in unjust enrichment? If this option is freely available (see Lord Nicholls of Birkenhead, Knowing Receipt: The Need for a New Landmark in W. Cornish et al. (eds.), Restitution: Past, Present and Future (1998); J. Martin, Recipient Liability after Westdeutsche *1998+ Conv. 13), then knowing receipt, with its requirement of fault, must wither away. But it remains possible that for some reason inherent in the structure of such a claim, unjust enrichment is not generally available. In particular, if the plaintiff trust beneficiary's complaint is that the defendant has *L.Q.R. 398 received trust property from a trustee, then the situation necessarily involves at least three parties. (This is not true of cases, sometimes argued as knowing receipt, in which the plaintiff is a company, complaining about the defendant's receipt of company property; there are only two parties, and no trust as such. Gold might be such a case, but was argued as a trust case.) The difficulty of applying the defective transfer idea to fact patterns involving multiple parties remains an under-investigated area of unjust enrichment.