This chapter introduces the main topic of this book, inducing intimacy, and explains that the focus is deceptively induced sex and intimate relationships (i.e., sex and sexual and/or romantic relationships). It then sets out the book’s core aims, that is, to examine how the law has responded to inducing intimacy as a form of wrongdoing and source of harms and what can this tell us about the justifiability and desirability of using law to respond to these practices in the present age. The chapter also outlines the scope of the book and the sources used before introducing the theoretical framework that informs the analysis in the remaining chapters, which is based on the cultural significance of sex and marriage, including their significance for self-construction. The chapter closes by outlining the main arguments of the book, including the potential for its historical analysis to inform contemporary debates about whether and how to respond to inducing intimacy via law today.

This chapter examines the action of breach of promise of marriage to show its relationships with deception. It outlines how a broken promise of marriage, which could always imply deception regarding intention to keep the promise, attracted damages and highlights how known deception constituted an aggravation. The chapter also demonstrates how deception about certain features of oneself or one’s circumstances could justify a fiancé(e)’s decision to break a promise of marriage. Beyond these points, the chapter shows how conventions about relationships shaped the processes by which promises of marriage could be inferred or imputed, and it explores the links between actions of breach of promise of marriage and changing expectations of marriage, including the expectation that it should be based on real love. Through this process, the chapter offers an original argument about the decline of breach of promise at marriage which reveals its changing relationship to deception. The chapter concludes with some reflections on what actions of breach of promise suggest about the capacity of law to regulate promises and statements of future intention, as they relate to intimacy, in a contemporary context.

This chapter explores the civil wrong of seduction to establish its nature and parameters and draw out its associations with deception. It argues that, as the earliest legal response to deceptive sex, seduction is in some senses the civil law analogue of later criminal laws. The chapter then shows how the action of seduction was rooted in the idea that deception was wrongful because it was one way of leading a woman off the ‘right’ path and that the harms it caused reflected the gendered significance of marriage and other ‘moral’ forms of intimacy. Furthermore, it highlights how these features of the action provided a framework within which the range of qualifying deceptions was limited and the temporal dimensions of the wrong were set. Finally, the chapter offers some reflections on how the distinctions between private and public introduced in Chapter 1 bore on the decision to keep seduction a civil wrong before foregrounding how these observations, and those made throughout the rest of the chapter, are pertinent to contemporary discussions about criminalising deceptive sex.

This chapter argues that building strong institutions and a productive economy in the aftermath of conflict is not enough and that rebuilding lost social capital and trust is of paramount importance. Intergroup trust matters deeply, as the same formal institutions can have divergent effects in different social structures and for different levels of social capital. Starting from the so-called contact hypothesis that fostering positive intergroup interaction builds trust, it is argued that reconciliation and the rebuilding of social trust are also part of the promising blend of propeace policies. A variety of empirical studies are discussed, ranging from reconciliation efforts in Rwanda and Sierra Leone to programs fostering intergroup contacts in Spain, Nigeria, India and Iraq. While we find that more intense group contacts deploy typically desirable effects, trying to achieve reconciliation by altering beliefs through media campaigns is a double-edged sword that involves a series of dangers. We conclude this chapter by stressing the key role of stepping up critical thinking.

This chapter addresses an underappreciated source of epistemic dysfunction in today’s media environment: true-but-unrepresentative information. Because media organizations are under tremendous competitive pressure to craft news that is in harmony with their audience’s preexisting beliefs, they have an incentive to accurately report on events and incidents that are selected, consciously or not, to support an impression that is exaggerated or ideologically convenient. Moreover, these organizations have to engage in this practice in order to survive in a hypercompetitive news environment.1

What is the role of “trusted communicators” in disseminating knowledge to the public? The trigger for this question, which is the topic of this set of chapters, is the widely shared belief that one of the most notable, and noted, consequences of the spread of the internet and social media is the collapse of sources of information that are broadly trusted across society, because the internet has eliminated the power of the traditional gatekeepers1 who identified and created trusted communicators for the public. Many commentators argue this is a troubling development because trusted communicators are needed for our society to create and maintain a common base of facts, accepted by the broader public, that is essential to a system of democratic self-governance. Absent such a common base or factual consensus, democratic politics will tend to collapse into polarized camps that cannot accept the possibility of electoral defeat (as they arguably have in recent years in the United States). I aim here to examine recent proposals to resurrect a set of trusted communicators and the gatekeeper function, and to critique them from both practical and theoretical perspectives. But before we can discuss possible “solutions” to the lack of gatekeepers and trusted communicators in the modern era, it is important to understand how those functions arose in the pre-internet era.

Political scientist and ethicist Russell Hardin observed that “trust depends on two quite different dimensions: the motivation of the potentially trusted person to attend to the truster’s interests and his or her competence to do so.”1 Our willingness to trust an actor thus generally turns on inductive reasoning: our perceptions of that actor’s motives and competence, based on our own experiences with that actor.2 Trust and distrust are also both episodic and comparative concepts, as whether we trust a particular actor depends in part on when we are asked – and to whom we are comparing them.3 And depending on our experience, distrust is sometimes wise: “[D]istrust is sometimes the only credible implication of the evidence. Indeed, distrust is sometimes not merely a rational assessment but it is also benign, in that it protects against harms rather than causing them.”4

It was 1971 and Los Angeles Times editor Nick Williams had what he called a “terribly uneasy feeling.” In a letter to one of the paper’s Washington correspondents, he wrote of his suspicion that journalism had “lost credibility … with an alarming percentage of the people.” If the plummet continued, Williams fretted, journalists will have “destroyed or weakened a keystone of our Constitution.”1

The internet has remade both the media and the social institutions that surround the media. Speech was not cheap in the twentieth century. News organizations had to buy newsprint, paper, distribution networks, transmitters, spectrum licenses – all kinds of things that cost much more than a Facebook page – if they wished to reach an audience. But the few news organizations that could cover these costs held a safe market position, and from this perch, they wielded a great deal of epistemic and moral authority in their communities. They became “gatekeepers” with the power and the responsibility to decide what information, and what claims, were fit to print. Much of media law, and particularly First Amendment law, seems to have developed around the assumption that news organizations could and would play this gatekeeping role, and that the government should therefore rarely need to.

Trust in media institutions has declined more or less apace with trust in every other kind of major institution in public life. Or perhaps it is more correct, as Ashutosh Bhagwat observes in his contribution to this project, to say that trust has declined in the types of media institutions, the proverbial Walter Cronkites, that dominated “the media” during the twentieth-century period when modern American ideals around free speech and journalistic value were still taking form.

In the wake of the 2019 COVID-19 pandemic, at-home digital care has expanded. This change has set off a cascade of effects, including new pathways for information flows that include a wider array of direct-to-consumer companies and products. This new landscape requires a reexamination of the implicit and explicit social contract between patients, clinicians, and the health delivery system: Who has access to personal health information? What is the appropriate role of commercial companies? Are people who continue to receive most of their care in clinical settings subject to the new norms of at-home care? This technology and circumstance drive change in health is not a new phenomenon. In this chapter, we examine the emergence of the Michigan BioTrust for Health in 2009 as an instance of renegotiating the social contract between stakeholders in response to cultural and technological changes that made information more available and accessible to a broader community of users. In the case of the BioTrust, Michigan’s four million “legacy” newborn screening bloodspots and the related health information were repurposed to be more widely available, not only for public health, but also for research. Based on prior research on the ethical and policy implications for patients that were part of the legacy system (i.e. those being asked to make the change from old to new systems of care), we review key findings on attitudes about informed consent and notification, partnerships with commercial companies, and trust. We review consumer preferences and expectations in the context of the BioTrust for Health and the expanded use of newborn screening bloodspots and consider their implications for the governance of at-home digital health care.

Doing research on the impact of traumatic experiences can be both heartening and heart-rending. People and situations are encountered that would touch the hardest of hearts, and others are met who inspire with their tenacity and strength to go on. Psychological trauma and adaptation to traumatic events is without question a truly fascinating and important field. You don’t have to look hard to find stories of stress and trauma. Crisis and catastrophe happen with remarkable regularity. Yet the attributes that help or hinder people when they meet misfortune are not well understood. In this chapter contemporary models and definitions of trauma are reviewed. And research that shows us that traumatic experiences are shaped by social and political factors is briefly considered to highlight the relevance of social sciences and social psychology, specifically to the study of trauma, as they offer a set of analytical tools. This allows us to unravel the social and political processes that matter to how people cope with adversity, which leads to a conclusion that emphasises that a social psychological perspective on trauma is useful and necessary.