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Ill-gotten Gains: Evasion, Blackmail, Fraud, and Kindred Puzzles of the Law

NCJ Number
173885
Author(s)
L Katz
Date Published
1996
Length
307 pages
Annotation
A law professor examines the legal, philosophical, and moral issues related to actions that use subterfuge and circumvention and analyzes the dilemmas involved in determining the underlying principles that guide both law and moral decisions related to evasion, blackmail, fraud, and other behaviors.
Abstract
The analysis focuses on the legal and moral dilemmas involved in distinguishing between tax avoidance and tax evasion, hard bargaining and blackmail, and other forms of behavior. The discussion notes the crucial factors involved in crimes such as insider trading, blackmail, and plagiarism and links these factors to cases in which misappropriation is not considered a crime. The author argues that society is generally uninterested in final outcomes and highly sensitive to the means of achieving those outcomes. This analysis suggests that much behavior that people intuitively consider to be devious Machiavellian, or diabolical is actually perfectly moral, whereas much behavior that a free society considers to be moral is actually immoral. Notes and index

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