Recent empirical work demonstrates that some instances of material deception are perceived by ordinary people as consent-defeating, whereas other instances are not. One hypothesized account of these divergent lay intuitions draws on the notion of “essence”: Roughly speaking, lies that pertain to the “core” or “nature” of a consented-to act are perceived as precluding consent, whereas lies that pertain to features that are “nonessential” or “collateral” to the act are perceived as compatible with consent. To assess this hypothesized account, an independent measure of “essence” – one that does not rely with problematic circularity on notions of consent – is needed. This chapter draws on an emerging cognitive science literature that deploys linguistic probes to investigate how people intuitively represent human action. Here, we will consider two such probes, the “by” test and the “basically doing” test, and observe that whereas the former predicts judgments of consent, the latter does not.

Misinformation pervades our everyday lives, ranging from dangerous to harmless, malicious to well-intentioned. Intentional deception is a wide-reaching form of misinformation, that is sometimes harmful and sometimes socially positive or acceptable. Deception includes various behaviors that obscure the truth, mislead, or promote falsehoods. Misrepresentation, in certain instances, may be misleading or false but is normatively expected as standard practice. Thus, we ask: What aspects of deception produce different perceptions? How can community governance of misinformation adjust based on social perceptions and norms? This chapter addresses these questions, exploring governance of everyday misinformation in three Instagram domains: dating, food, and retail.

Chapter 5 addresses undercover investigations of street begging, a topic that illustrates the new genre’s prioritizing of journalistic considerations over humanitarian aims. Beggary’s conflation with fraud in the public imagination made the practice a unique object for incognito investigating. Undercover journalists sought to reveal not the sufferings of those driven to public humiliation but the exploitation of charity by a cadre of swindlers. Despite failing in this ambition, such would-be exposés were perennially popular with newspaper audiences, who saw in them a simulation of their own hypothetical shipwreck but also a low-life equivalent to the specialist expertise and terminology characteristic of all professions. Undercover investigators thereby forged the troubling connection between respectability and criminality that informs the portrayal of beggars in fictional works such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ (1891), a Sherlock Holmes story in which a respected businessman is exposed as a professional beggar.

Many legal and political commentators dubbed Donald Trump’s false claim that he was the actual victor of the 2020 American presidential election, ‘the Big Lie’. No matter how he complained and dissembled, he lost. After losing the 2020 election, Trump went on a fundraising binge, asking his supporters to give to his legal defense fund so that he could litigate the results of the 2020 election, which he fraudulently claimed he had won. According to the House of Representatives’ January 6 Select Committee, this fund did not exist. As Select Committee member Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren put it, ‘the Big Lie was also a big rip-off’. Because the 2020 presidential election was not stolen, and the legal defense fund he touted was nonexistent, Trump’s post-2020 election fundraising was a fraud within a fraud – giving rise to a reasonable argument that it violated the federal wire fraud statute and also constituted common law fraud.

This chapter analyses crimes involving procuring sex, including procuring sex by deception. It argues that to appreciate the nature of these offences, and their place within this book, it is necessary both to understand how the verb ‘to procure’ was interpreted, including when and why it required deception, and to pay attention to the acts whose procurement was proscribed by law. The chapter provides elucidation on both fronts, showing how the procuring offences were geared towards prohibiting ‘illicit’ (i.e., immoral) sexual activities and therefore criminalised the use of deception to lure others into committing such acts. In demonstrating this point, the chapter argues that a culturally sensitive vision of what makes intimacy valuable shaped and constrained the use of the procuring offences. Finally, the chapter argues that the demise of the procuring offences set the stage for the expansion of the crime of rape by deception and that examining how the procuring offences worked yields important lessons for those attempting to engage critically with this development.

This section provides examples for a number of different kinds of documents associated with the courts, with crime and punishment, namely Curia Regis Rolls (published for the early thirteenth century in a fascinating series of volumes), Ecclesiastical suit rolls, relating to questions of adultery and fornication, Gaol Delivery rolls recording the pleas of those who were then freed from prison, and the Assize of Bread, concerned with maintaining standards in the production of bread and ale.

Many of the justifications for the electoral college focus on maintaining the harmony and cohesion of the Republic. Upon closer scrutiny, however, we find that the electoral college does not contain the results of fraud and accidental circumstances within states. Instead, it magnifies their consequences for the outcome nationally. Direct election, by contrast, would create disincentives for fraud and recounts. Similarly, the electoral college does not produce concurrent majorities around the country and force winning candidates to moderate their stances to appeal successfully to all segments of society and all geographic locations. Equally problematic is the view that victory in the electoral college ensures presidents effective coalitions for governing. Moreover, the electoral college does not produce compromise within states, and it is fundamentally different from constitutional provisions that require supermajorities to take positive action. The electoral college produces neither majority-vote victories for presidents nor mandates for their governing. It is also not a bastion of federalism. Direct election of the president would not diminish the role of state and local parties and officials or the nominating conventions, and national standards for elections are already in place and not to be feared.

At the intersection of the social, political, cultural and scientific realms, the introduction pressents a general framework for the wirting of a history of an embodiment of connections, that brings to the fore unexpected mechanisms of coproduction of knowledge, endless debates on objectivity and medical pluralism, and fierce struggles for the sake of authority, recognition and prestige on elusive subjects such as hunger, fasting, inanition and starvation. Since scientific controversies about hunger and inanition were not limited to academic circles, they spread throughout an urban public arena that acted as a useful playground in that battle for authority.

In the previous chapter, we examined the notion of capacity and legal personality under the Qatari civil and commercial law. In general, article 108 CC conflates capacity and consent by stating that consent (to contract) is only valid in respect of entities that possess capacity under the law. Overall, the law distinguishes between persons with full legal capacity and those with partial or no legal capacity. Persons with limited capacity may contract through a guardian and in limited circumstances not involving a significant financial commitment they are free to contract without guardianship. Entities with full capacity may freely contract in their person.

Fraud in medical research is a broad term that encompasses several different misdemeanors: falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, and deception. The scale of medical research fraud isn’t negligible, either. While reliable estimates are hard to come by - since people are unlikely to implicate themselves - studies suggest that the true rate of fraud among published studies lies somewhere between 0.01% and 0.4%. Chapter 17 discusses why people choose to commit fraud in medical research and how the scientific system can incentivize this type of behaviour. Additionally, the chapter explores how medical fraud ultimately affects the rate and direction of medical progress through mechanisms such as the squandering of resources and a loss of trust. The chapter concludes by discussing how we can dissuade future misconduct in medical research.

Due diligence is absolutely key to stem possible problems with investment migration programs. Focusing on examples from Canada, Saint-Kitts and Nevis, and the European Union, this chapter offers a critical assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of due diligence practices.

Although the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties devotes nine articles to invalidity of treaties, cases rarely arise in practice. Circumstances covered by the Convention include violation of internal law, error, fraud, corruption, coercion and violation of a peremptory norm of international law (jus cogens). Article 46 of the Convention covers the first of these, providing that a state may not invoke the fact that its consent to be bound has been expressed in violation of its internal law unless that violation was manifest and concerned a rule of fundamental importance. The chapter examines the meaning of the key terms of this provision and possible cases in which this might arise. In the context of coercion, the chapter looks at treaties which might be concluded by the threat or use of force, peace treaties and unequal treaties. The scope of peremptory norms (jus cogens) is also discussed, together with the consequences of invalidity.

Provides a critical evaluation of the state effort to confiscate ‘illicit profits’ from economic collaboration and black-market exploitation of public misery. The economic purge provides significant evidence for the practices of black-market traffic during and after the Occupation, for the extent of black-market trade, and for the impossibility of holding most offenders accountable because the traffic was so widespread and major offenders found ways to keep their activities and profits hidden from state investigation.

The notion of a “separable” arbitration agreement--- presuming that the validity and ambit of an arbitration clause are to be judged independently from that of the overall contract between the parties---is the cornerstone of the arbitration law of virtually every state. Such a rule functions to protect the agreement to arbitrate from assertions (often raised in bad faith and for purposes of delay) that the overall agreement is subject to some infirmity that necessarily “taints” the submission to arbitration as well; the impact of the rule is that such assertions fall to be decided, not by courts, but by the arbitral tribunal itself.Despite frequent objections that this allocation of authority is not “logical”---that every part of a contract must stand or fall together---the rule of “separability” is best understood as a sensible default rule respecting the probable expectation of contracting parties (who were unlikely to have contemplated that a claim, say, of fraud, and a claim going to the merits of a cause of action, would fall to be adjudicated by different decisionmakers). Application of “separability” grounded in challenges based on fraud is in fact entirely intuitive; other sorts of challenges (perhaps suggesting a failure of any consensus whatever between the parties) may be more difficult.Still, the fil conducteur is clear enough, and jurisprudence across national lines remarkably consistent.