Law Commons^™

Gender And Deception: Moral Perceptions And Legal Responses, Gregory Klass, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

Articles

Decades of social science research has shown that the identity of the parties in a legal action can affect case outcomes. Parties’ race, gender, class, and age all affect decisions of prosecutors, judges, juries, and other actors in a criminal prosecution or civil litigation. Less studied has been how identity might affect other forms of legal regulation. This Essay begins to explore perceptions of deceptive behavior—i.e., how wrongful it is, and the extent to which it should be regulated or punished—and the relationship of those perceptions to the gender of the actors. We hypothesize that ordinary people tend to perceive …

What Trump's Business Fraud Charges Mean -- A Former Prosecutor Explains The 34 Felony Counts And Obstacles Ahead For Manhattan's Da, Jeffrey Bellin

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Trump's Indictment Stretches Us Legal System In New Ways -- A Former Prosecutor Explains 4 Key Points To Understand, Jeffrey Bellin

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Fraud-On-The-Market Liability In The Esg Era, Kevin S. Haeberle

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Debtor Needs To Have Benefitted From Fraud To Be Barred A Discharge Under 11 U.S.C. § 523(A)(2)(A), Elizabeth Tighe

Bankruptcy Research Library

(Excerpt)

Title 11 of the United States Code (the “Bankruptcy Code”) provides that a court may grant a debtor a discharge of its debts, subject to certain conditions and exceptions. One exception to dischargeability is set forth in section 523(a)(2)(A), which bars a discharge from debt “for money, property, services, or an extension, renewal, or refinancing of credit, to the extent obtained by . . . false pretenses, a false representation, or actual fraud, other than a statement respecting the debtor's or an insider's financial condition.”

A key phrase in the statute is “obtained by” and courts have applied a …

Schutte & Polansky: Shifting The Landscape Of False Claims Act Litigation & Compliance, Jessica Tillipman, Teddie Arnold

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The Supreme Court issued two opinions in June 2023 that are set to alter the False Claims Act (“FCA”) landscape for years to come. In United States ex rel. Schutte v. SuperValu Inc., 143 S. Ct. 1391 (2023) the Court elevated the scienter element of the FCA in cases dealing with a defendant’s compliance with law or regulation, whereby no longer can a defendant point to an objective interpretation of an ambiguous law or regulation to the exclusion of a company’s subjective knowledge at the time of claim submission. In United States, ex rel. Polansky v. Exec. Health Res., Inc., …

Contract Production In M&A Markets, Stephen J. Choi, Mitu Gulati, Matthew Jennejohn, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Contract scholarship has devoted considerable attention to how contract terms are designed to incentivize parties to fulfill their obligations. Less attention has been paid to the production of contracts and the tradeoffs between using boilerplate terms and designing bespoke provisions. In thick markets everyone uses the standard form despite the known drawbacks of boilerplate. But in thinner markets, such as the private deal M&A world, parties trade off costs and benefits of using standard provisions and customizing clauses. This Article reports on a case study of contract production in the M&A markets. We find evidence of an informal information network …

Universalizing Fraud, Parmida Enkeshafi

Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy Sidebar

The criminal trial of Elizabeth Holmes has reanimated public interest in fraud. Holmes, once a Silicon Valley prodigy, was charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and eleven counts of wire fraud. A jury found Holmes guilty on four counts, potentially subjecting her to 80 years in prison. This Note uses the example of Elizabeth Holmes's case to examine more broadly the role of morality in fraud and argues for a new framework by which to articulate and prosecute fraud.

Criminal jurisprudence has struggled to construct a satisfactory definition of "white-collar crime" since sociologist Edwin H. Sutherland …

Telemedicine Scams, Katrice B. Copeland

Journal Articles

Telemedicine emerged as a lifeline during the COVID-10 pandemic. Although the technology existed long before the pandemic, its use was limited due to strict government regulations that limited reimbursement for telemedicine visits. In response to the pandemic, the Government waiver many of its restrictions for the duration of the Public Health Emergency. These changes fueled the growth of telemedicine.

The problem, however, is that telemedicine makes it easier to conduct fraud on a larger scale because without in-person visits, medical providers can reach many more beneficiaries in a short period of time. Thus, the size and scale of typical health …

Righting A Reproductive Wrong: A Statutory Tort Solution To Misrepresentation By Reproductive Tissue Providers, Yaniv Heled, Hillel Y. Levin, Timothy D. Lytton, Liza Vertinsky

Scholarly Works

Fraud, misrepresentation, and other unfair trade practices plague the market for human reproductive tissue. The sale of sperm, eggs, and embryos is virtually unregulated in almost all states, and courts have been inhospitable to victims. As a result, children are born with genetic disorders that impose extreme financial and personal hardship. Proposals for direct government oversight have, for the most part, failed to gain traction, and litigation has yielded inadequate remedies.

This Article assesses these problems and proposes model legislation that would eliminate doctrinal obstacles to holding unscrupulous reproductive tissue providers liable. By making it easier for parents to bring …

Mckinsey & Company’S Conduct And Conflicts At The Heart Of The Opioid Epidemic, Hearing Before The House Committee On Oversight And Reform, Jessica Tillipman

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

On April 27, 2022, Jessica Tillipman, Assistant Dean for Government Procurement Law Studies at The George Washington University Law School testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform regarding McKinsey & Company's potential Organizational Conflict of Interest between its contracts with the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and its commercial, opioid manufacturer clients. Her testimony addressed the longstanding need to update and clarify the current legal framework governing Organizational Conflicts of Interest (OCIs) in the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and the importance of government contractors maintaining strong internal ethics and compliance programs.

Patent Reality Checks: Eliminating Patents On Fake, Impossible And Other Inoperative Inventions, Jorge L. Contreras

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

The recent assertion of patents originally held by Theranos, the defunct blood analysis company whose founders are under federal indictment for fraud, highlights the existence of patents that might claim non-existent or inoperative inventions. While such patents may ultimately be subject to validity challenges in court, their issuance nevertheless has harmful effects on markets and innovation. I propose several administrative and legislative measures directed toward the elimination of patents claiming inoperative inventions including (1) increasing USPTO efforts to detect potentially inoperable inventions, (2) heightening examination requirements, including a certification of enablement, for certain inventions, (3) enabling greater public input into …

Predictors Of Fraudulent Monday Effect Workers Compensation Claims Filing, Sharla St. Rose

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Monday Effect Claims refer to workers compensation claims filed on Mondays for easy to conceal injuries such as strains, sprains, and back injuries. Researchers and industry experts have long believed that there is an element of fraud in these claims, resulting from individuals who were injured during the weekend, while not at work, looking to take advantage of the medical benefits available through workers compensation insurance. Fraudulent Monday Effect Claims (FMEC), as presented in this study, specifically refer to workers compensation claims filed for injuries that occurred while an individual was not at work, presumably during the weekend.

A study …

Changing The Culture Of Nurse Practitioners: Incorporating Medical Billing And Coding To Prevent Fraud, Waste And Abuse, Tralissa Morrow

DNP Research Projects

Medical coding and billing errors are avoidable problems that have afflicted practitioners for decades. Correct coding and billing are required for reimbursement of healthcare services. Fraud, waste and abuse increase healthcare costs, reduce the quality of care provided and directly impact costs to patients. This pilot study was intended to evaluate the impact of an educational webinar on medical billing and coding, fraud, waste and abuse on nurse practitioner (NP) knowledge using a pretest posttest design. Mean scores increased from 58.4% to 76.4%. Test reliability was low at 0.477 (pretest) and 0.142 (posttest) with two questions that were unable to …

The Uniform Commercial Code Survey: Introduction, Jennifer S. Martin, Colin P. Marks, Wayne Barnes

Faculty Articles

The survey that follows highlights the most important developments of 2020 dealing with domestic and international sales of goods, personal property leases, payments letters of credit, documents of title, investment securities, and secured transactions.

Lawyers, Mistakes, And Moral Growth (Reviewing Mike H. Bassett, The Man In The Ditch: A Redemption Story For Today), Vincent R. Johnson

Faculty Articles

In the literature of legal ethics, relatively little is said about the psychic turmoil that lawyers face while anticipating or defending a grievance, malpractice claim, or criminal charge. Even less is said about how lawyers who are found guilty of violating professional standards should go about rebuilding their reputations and personal lives after such proceedings have run their course, often with embarrassing results having been made public. Against this bleak backdrop, a dazzlingly introspective and hopeful book about lawyers and their mistakes-and about their suffering and possible moral growth-has been published.

The Fraud Triangle And Tax Evasion, Leandra Lederman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The “fraud triangle”—a theory of why people commit fraud —is the preeminent framework for analyzing fraud in the accounting literature. It developed out of studies of fraudsters, including inmates convicted of embezzlement. The three components of the fraud triangle are (1) an incentive or pressure (usually financial); (2) opportunity; and (3) rationalization.

There is a separate, extensive legal literature on tax compliance and evasion. The fraud triangle is largely absent from this legal literature, although tax evasion is a type of fraud. This Article rectifies that oversight, analyzing how using the fraud triangle as a lens can inform the legal …

Working Hard Or Making Work? Plaintiffs' Attorneys Fees In Securities Fraud Class Actions, Stephen J. Choi, Jessica Erickson, A. C. Pritchard

Articles

In this article, we study attorney fees awarded in the largest securities class actions: “mega- settlements.” Consistent with prior work, we find larger fee awards but lower percentages in these cases. We also find that courts are more likely to reject or modify fee requests made in connection with the largest settlements. We conjecture that this scrutiny provides an incentive for law firms to bill more hours, not to advance the case, but to help justify large fee awards—“make work.” The results of our empirical tests are consistent with plaintiffs’ attorneys investing more time in litigation against larger companies, with …

Cercla Cleanup 2020.04.09 Response From Epa To Eljc Letter Dated Dec. 2019, United States Environmental Protection Agency

Environmental Law and Justice Clinic - Hunters Point Naval Shipyard Documents

ELJC’s Dec. 13, 2019 letter commented on EPA’s November 15 letter to the Navy regarding the Navy's draft evaluation of radiological soil remediation goals at HPNS. This is EPA’s response to the four concerns identified in that letter: consideration of the risk posed by homegrown produce; lack of health based support for remediation goal for radium-226; retesting’s use of methods to adequately detect pollution; and, the Navy’s repeated unfounded statements to the public that the remediation goals are protective.

High Crimes: Liability For Directors Of Retail Marijuana Corporations, Lauren A. Newell

Law Faculty Scholarship

Selling retail marijuana in the United States is illegal — or is it? A rising number of states have legalized the retail sale of marijuana and are busily regulating these sales and the companies that make them. Even so, the sale of marijuana is a crime under federal law. Are companies that sell retail marijuana duly sanctioned, productive contributors to their state economies, or are they felons just waiting for the wheels of justice to turn in their direction? At this moment, no one can answer that question with certainty.

What is certain is that more companies are being formed …

Contract Consentability: Autonomy Threats, Benefits, And Framing, Eric A. Zacks

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

A District Court May Not Enjoin Third-Party Claims Against Insurers In A Securities-Fraud Receivership Without Alternative Compensation Scheme, Justin Henderson

Bankruptcy Research Library

(Excerpt)

Within its equitable power, a district court may place the assets of a defendant into receivership and appoint a receiver to protect a plaintiff’s interest in property where the rights over that property are disputed. In general, the purpose of this equity receivership is to marshal assets, preserve value, equitably distribute to creditors, and, either reorganize, or orderly liquidate. This power is an extraordinary remedy only justified by extreme situations, such as where there is a high probability that fraudulent conduct has occurred or will occur to frustrate the claim, or when there is a threat that the disputed …

The Complex Legacy Of R. V. Cuerrier: Hiv Nondisclosure Prosecutions And Their Impact On Sexual Assault Law, Isabel Grant

All Faculty Publications

This article examines the impact of the Supreme Court of Canada decision in R. v. Cuerrier from two vantage points. First, the article examines the impact of the decision on HIV nondisclosure prosecutions. Second, it examines the damage done by Cuerrier to sexual assault law outside of the HIV context. The article argues that Cuerrier has both overcriminalized people living with HIV and distorted the law of sexual assault. Through Cuerrier, and subsequent cases, the Supreme Court of Canada has unduly limited the concept of consent and its voluntariness requirement, and distorted the concept of fraud such that deceptions around …

Understanding Illicit Insemination And Fertility Fraud From Patient Experience To Legal Reform, Jody L. Madeira

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Recently, several cases have been filed in North America and Europe alleging that fertility physicians inseminated former patients with their own sperm only to have this conduct come to light decades later when their unsuspecting adult children use direct-to-consumer genetic tests and learn that they are not biologically related to their fathers and often that they have multiple half-siblings. For instance, Donald Cline of Indianapolis, Indiana, has over sixty doctor-conceived children, with more continuing to come forward. Although these cases induce disgust, it has thus far proven difficult to hold these physicians legally accountable because their conduct falls within gaps …

Private Company Lies, Elizabeth Pollman

All Faculty Scholarship

Rule 10b-5’s antifraud catch-all is one of the most consequential pieces of American administrative law and most highly developed areas of judicially-created federal law. Although the rule broadly prohibits securities fraud in both public and private company stock, the vast majority of jurisprudence, and the voluminous academic literature that accompanies it, has developed through a public company lens.

This Article illuminates how the explosive growth of private markets has left huge portions of U.S. capital markets with relatively light securities fraud scrutiny and enforcement. Some of the largest private companies by valuation grow in an environment of extreme information asymmetry …

The Problem With Predators, June Carbone, William K. Black

Faculty Works

Both corporate theory and sex discrimination law start with presumptions that CEOs seek to advance legitimate ends and design the internal organization of business enterprises to achieve such ends. Yet, a growing literature questions why CEOs and boards of directors nonetheless select for Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and toxic masculinity, despite the downsides associated with these traits. Three scholarly literatures—economics, criminology, and gender theory—draw on advances in psychology to shed new light on the construction of seemingly dysfunctional corporate cultures. They start by questioning the assumption that CEOs—even CEOs of seemingly mainstream businesses—necessarily seek to advance “legitimate” ends. Instead, they suggest …

The Compliance Mentorship Program: Improving Ethics And Compliance In Small Government Contractors, Jessica Tillipman, Vijaya Surampudi

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Over the past decade, the anti-corruption, ethics, and compliance landscape has changed dramatically. This is a direct consequence of a global anti-corruption enforcement effort led by the United States through its enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The increase in enforcement has also been spurred by the adoption of several multilateral anti-corruption agreements, such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Anti-Bribery Convention and the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC). These agreements have spurred several countries to enact anti-corruption laws, such as the U.K. Bribery Act, Brazil’s Clean Company Act, and France’s Loi Sapin II. The …

Does 'No, Not Without A Condom' Mean 'Yes, Even Without A Condom'?: The Fallout From R V Hutchinson, Lise Gotell, Isabel Grant

All Faculty Publications

In R v Kirkpatrick, the Court of Appeal for British Columbia held that consent to sexual activity cannot be established where a man proceeds with unprotected vaginal intercourse when his sexual partner has insisted on a condom. While this finding should be uncontroversial, it is in fact contrary to the Supreme Court of Canada ruling in R v Hutchinson. In this comment we argue that the approach taken in Kirkpatrick is correct and consistent with the landmark decision in R v Ewanchuk. We urge the Supreme Court of Canada to reconsider its majority judgment in Hutchinson in order to fully …

Chandra V. Schulte, 135 Nev. Adv. Op. 66 (December 26, 2019), Michael Desmond

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court determined that (1) the spousal exception bars recovery from the Nevada Real Estate Education, Research and Recovery Fund (“Fund”) for fraud incurred during the period of the marriage and (2) where a spouse co-owned the defrauded property, the surviving spouse may not recover from the Fund.

Cercla Cleanup 2019.12.13 Letter To Epa On Its November Comments To The Draft Fyr Addendum For Soil, Golden Gate University School Of Law

Environmental Law and Justice Clinic - Hunters Point Naval Shipyard Documents

December 13, 2019 letter to EPA providing additional comments on the Fourth Five Year Review and related documents which must analyze whether the cleanup is protective of human health and the environment: the Navy’s risk assessment should consider consumption of produce grown on the former shipyard; the Navy must provide rationale for the remedial goal used for radium-223; the retesting must use adequate sensitivity to detect radioactivity far below the current remedial goals which are not protective, and; the Navy continues to make unfounded assertions about the protectiveness of the remedy. (6 pages)