Intimate Lies and the Law

Harvard Law Review 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.


Domestic Violence Report 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.


Lori O'Connor, Public Prosecutions Melfort, Saskatchewan, Canadian Law Library Review/Revue canadienne des bibliothques de droit 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


Elizabeth Emens, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Columbia Law School, and author of Life Admin: How I Learned to Do Less, Do Better, and Live More 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.


Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law, Harvard Law School 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.


Maxine Eichner, Graham Kenan Distinguished Professor of Law, UNC School of Law 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.


Joanna L. Grossman, Ellen K. Solender Endowed, Chair in Women and the Law, SMU Dedman 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 ston...

Jill Elaine Hasday is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor and the Centennial Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School. Her work focuses on family law, antidiscrimination law, constitutional law, and legal history. She graduated from Yale Law School and Yale College and clerked for Judge Patricia M. Wald of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Introduction: So Much Deception, So Little Time Part I: The Practice of Intimate Deception 1: Why Do People Deceive Their Intimates? 2: Why Does Intimate Deception Work? 3: What Injuries Can Intimate Deceivers Inflict? Part II: The Law of Intimate Deception 4: A Legal History of Intimate Deception 5: Modern Law's Sharp Divide Between Deception Within and Outside Intimacy 6: The Legal Protection of Ordinary Deception in Courtship, Sex, and Marriage 7: Intimate Deception Outside of Romantic, Sexual, or Marital Relationships Part III: Reforming the Law of Intimate Deception 8: Work to Be Done Conclusion Notes Acknowledgments Index