<p>Correspondence is a relation that obtains between mens rea and actus reus that, in general, is necessary for the justifiable imposition of criminal liability. Theorists have disagreed about the right way to characterize the relevant relation. The dominant existent theories of correspondence are descriptive: they maintain that correspondence depends only on descriptive facts. But some theorists have raised the possibility that correspondence might, at least sometimes, be normative in nature: it may depend on a defendant’s failure to measure up to some normative standard. I here argue that descriptive theories of correspondence are more promising than normative theories. Conditioning correspondence on a determination of culpability begets explanatory circularity, but varieties of normative theory that condition correspondence on just one component of culpability—on either responsibility or wrongdoing—struggle to account for the intuition that punishing certain kinds of defendants would be unjust along multiple dimensions.</p>