Fleming on Two Centuries of Policing Swindles and Humbugs @GeorgetownLaw

Anne Fleming, Georgetown University Law Center, has published Two Centuries of Policing Swindles and Humbugs at 46 Reviews in American History 217 (2018). Here is the abstract.

Since the 1860s, when P.T. Barnum, the self-described Prince of Humbug, practiced his art, much has changed in the way that commercial deception is policed. Yet, humbug remains an important tool for some modern American capitalists. Indeed, the American marketplace has never been nor will ever be entirely cleansed of fraud, as Edward Balleisen reports in his exciting new book, Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff. Fraud chronicles the history of business fraud and its regulation over the past two hundred years, beginning in the early nineteenth century. Unlike previous works that focus on particular fraudsters or incidents of fraud, Balleisen casts a wide net that draws in examples from many corners of the world of commerce, including from the sale of securities, lightning rods, and other home improvement services, appliances, and medicine. An array of "capsule stories" illustrate the many varieties of business fraud and range of antifraud policing efforts over the past two centuries, as well as the similarities in approaches to fighting fraud across different domains of business within each era. Although this method does not yield "clean plotlines" or deep explorations of central figures and events, it serves Balleisen's purpose well, which is to find the enduring patterns and "key inflection points" in the fight against business fraud, in addition to explaining the value of this history for present-day policymaking. Without lingering for long on the question of how we define "fraud," Balleisen provides historians and policymakers with a rich history of the machinery designed to stop and prevent it.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

Memoirs, Authenticity, and Fraud

Simon Stern, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, has published Sentimental Frauds , at 36 Law & Social Inquiry (2011). Here is the abstract.

This paper examines the class action against James Frey, alleging fraud because of his falsehoods in A Million Little Pieces. Memoirs often include inaccuracies or elaborate fabrications - including demonstrably false claims about the author's background and experiences - and yet, until the suit against Frey, there had never been a lawsuit against a memoirist alleging fraud on this basis. To explore the nature of the fraud allegations in this case, I turn to the eighteenth-century sentimental novel, which similarly linked readers’ reactions to the author’s emotional authenticity. Fraud was an ongoing concern for sentimental novelists, some of whom used elaborate editorial to ploys to disavow responsibility for the text, while others populated their novels with fraudulent characters, intended as foils for the protagonist. Following a discussion of these novels, I conclude by considering the implications of the Frey case for future claims of literary fraud, and I compare this example with the suit against Laura Albert for fraud in transactions relating to her novel Sarah (1999), published under the name J.T. LeRoy.