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This chapter looks at the idea of property in property offences. The first part looks at the development of property offences in the period up to the passing of the Larceny Act 1916. Developments in this period can be seen broadly in terms of attempts to adjust property offences to fit within the traditional common law model based on the physical taking of moveable property. The second part then looks at arguments about the reform and modernization of property offences around the passing of the Theft Act 1968 and its aftermath, in particular the increasing importance of the concept of dishonesty. The third section then argues that the development of the criminal law—and developments in the contemporary law—are best understood in terms of changes in the underlying social functions of property and their link to trust and civil order.

This chapter examines fraud in fee-for-service systems and managed care plans. A common health care fraud that is linked directly to fee-for-service is the submission of fraudulent claims to the Medicare program. Replacement of fee-for-service health care with managed care did not end health care fraud and abuse. This chapter explains how fraud is committed in major public insurance programs, focusing on cases of false diagnoses and unnecessary treatments, medical identity theft, and overcharging for services and equipment. It also considers upcoding, unbundling, and billing for uninsured and bogus services, along with fraud and abuse in nursing homes and home health care, rent-a-patient schemes, and pill-mill schemes. Finally, it discusses the emerging drug frauds in Medicare Part D, durable medical equipment frauds, and health care frauds that save money.

Migrant farmworkers’ exclusion from many labor protections and forms of social assistance forces them to rely on informal and illicit subsistence strategies. One such strategy is “identity loan,” in which a migrant with legal status loans an undocumented migrant the work authorization documents that the latter needs to work. Unlike “identity theft,” then, “identity loan” is the voluntary and mutually beneficial exchange of work authorization documents. This chapter explores why document exchange flourishes in migrant communities, even as labor supervisors take advantage of such loans to reduce their labor costs. Labor supervisors often threaten to falsely position identity “loans” as “thefts,” denying “identity recipients” their right to workers’ compensation insurance when they are injured. Thus the recent trend towards governing immigration through crime—that is, federal and local officials’ reliance on criminal prosecution to deter undocumented migration— hands labor supervisors yet one more tool to create a docile labor force.

With recent US federal data-protection statutes in mind, along with the climate of indifference to privacy suggested by self-revelatory patterns of online conduct and high-tech personal archiving, this Chapter argues that liberals need to think about privacy in a new way. Privacy should be thought of as a partly inalienable, foundational good. Informational privacy meets deep needs, whose satisfaction cannot be left to pure, unregulated choice. The tendency and the willingness to throw away privacy are troubling. The value of privacy is not just the opportunity for optional privacy states, but the experience of privacy and the habits of respect for privacy it constitutes. Since the 1970’s when they first began to analyze privacy in earnest, philosophers have linked the experience of privacy with dignity, autonomy, civility and intimacy. They linked it also to repose, self-expression, creativity, reflection. They tied it to the preservation of unique preferences and distinct traditions. The argument that privacy is a right whose normative basis is respect for persons opens the door to the further argument that privacy is also potentially a d uty. To respect oneself may require taking into account the way in which one’s personality and life enterprises could be affected by decisions to dispense with foundational goods that are damaged when one decides to flaunt, expose, and share, rather than to reserve, conceal and keep. The idea that some forms of respecting privacy reflect what Robert Post (citing Erving Goffman and Jeffrey Reiman) called “civility norms” of deference and demeanour similar illuminate why privacy duties and privacy duties of self-care make sense. Helen Nissenbaum’s analysis of privacy by reference to norms of the appropriateness specific behaviours and the distribution of certain information in social and cultural context has similar implications. If people are completely morally and legally free to pick and choose the privacy states they will enter, they are potentially deprived of highly valued states that promote their and their fellows vital interests. We need to restrain choice, if not by law, then somehow. Respect for privacy rights and the ascription of privacy duties must both be a part of a society’s formative project for shaping citizens. Liberals agree that there is something wrong with being watched and investigate d all the time. As Daniel Solove argues, surveillance can lead to “self-censorship and inhibition". Surveillance is a form of social control. Like surveillance, dispensing with one’s privacy is yielding to social control, and that that impacts freedom, too. Realizing this, the notion that some privacy should not be optional, waivable, or alienable should have instant credibility. But the liberal ideal becomes an ironic joke in a society in which people freely choose to be always in others’ lines of sight, much as it is a joke in a society in which they freely chose domination.