Intimacy and deception are often entangled. People deceive to lure someone into a relationship or to keep her there, to drain an intimate's bank account or to use her to acquire government benefits, to control an intimate or to resist domination, or to capture myriad other advantages. No subject is immune from deception in dating, sex, marriage, and family life. Intimates can lie or otherwise intentionally mislead each other about anything and everything.
Suppose you discover that an intimate has deceived you and inflicted severe-even life-altering-financial, physical, or emotional harm. After the initial shock and sadness, you might wonder whether the law will help you secure redress. But the legal system refuses to help most people deceived within an intimate relationship. Courts and legislatures have shielded this persistent and pervasive source of injury, routinely denying deceived intimates access to the remedies that are available for deceit in other contexts.
Jill Elaine Hasday's Intimate Lies and the Law is the first book that systematically examines deception in intimate relationships and uncovers the hidden body of law governing this duplicity. Hasday argues that the law has placed too much emphasis on protecting intimate deceivers and too little importance on helping the people they deceive. The law can and should do more to recognize, prevent, and redress the injuries that intimate deception can inflict.
Entering an intimate relationship should not mean losing the law's protection from deceit.
Industry Reviews
"Intimate Lies and the Law is thoroughly researched, analytically rigorous, and doctrinally pragmatic. The book is replete with fascinating narratives and legal puzzles. These are features a reader of Hasday's work has come to expect." -- Harvard Law Review
"Hasday's superpower seems to be a form of scholarship that thoroughly explores and exposes the unexamined. She draws connections we otherwise could not see." -- Domestic Violence Report
"This book was a delightful combination of well-researched and well-written academic prose, interspersed with illustrative examples of intimate deceptions cited from case law or media reports" -- Lori O'Connor, Public Prosecutions Melfort, Saskatchewan, Canadian Law Library Review/Revue canadienne des bibliothèques de droit
"Intimate Lies and the Law is rigorous, bold, and carefully researched, yet terrifically readable. Hasday has dug far and deep into the law and social science of intimate deception to give us an authoritative volume on this wrenching human domain. Whereas the law often blames victims for being duped, Hasday imagines a world in which trust is supported and rewarded. Her proposal for change-that the law treat intimate deception more like other kinds of
deception-is powerful and sweeping, yet practical and workable. Timely and important, Intimate Lies and the Law has the potential to reshape not only the legal terrain but the very human relationships that
live and breathe in the law's shadow." -- Elizabeth Emens, Professor of Law, Columbia Law School, and author of Life Admin: How I Learned to Do Less, Do Better, and Live More
"In Intimate Lies and the Law, Jill Hasday maps a big, fascinating, sobering subject: the law's regulation (including neglect) of deceptions amongst those closest to us. She explores this difficult terrain masterfully with verve, thoroughness, and a keen eye for the telling detail. She casts in a new light a huge and influential body of law that teems with experiences and lessons that are simultaneously familiar and odd. This is an important book that
will be of interest not only to academics but also to general readers. Impressively rigorous, it is also exceptionally accessible." -- Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
"Hasday breaks new ground in systematically analyzing the law on deception in intimate relationships. She intelligently exposes how incoherencies in this body of law creates a legal regime that undermines our deepest aspirations for family relationships. Readers will never look at this body of law the same way again." -- Maxine Eichner, Graham Kenan Distinguished Professor of Law, UNC School of Law
"With a masterful marshalling of evidence, Jill Hasday paints a bleak picture of intimate relationships and the pervasive deception that often shapes them. Hasday leaves no stone unturned, making a convincing case that the law has unjustifiably failed duped intimates by refusing to deploy standard legal remedies. Like everything Hasday writes, this book is comprehensively researched, effectively organized, and compelling from beginning to end. The only downside
to reading this book is the realization that your life, too, may be built on a bed of lies." -- Joanna L. Grossman, Ellen K. Solender Endowed Chair in Women and the Law, SMU Dedman School of Law
