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This chapter shows that an offense is consummate if the conduct it proscribes causes harm on each occasion on which it is performed. The paradigm, ‘core’ examples of crimes in any jurisdiction, satisfies this description. But some offenses proscribe conduct that does not cause harm on each occasion in which it is performed. Such offenses are called nonconsummate (or anticipatory or inchoate). Statutes that proscribe drug possession are examples of nonconsummate offenses. The chapter tries to make some headway in identifying the moral limits of the criminal law in creating and enforcing nonconsummate offenses.

This much-publicized trial took place in 1979 in Fort Worth, Texas. A millionaire oil equipment producer was accused of soliciting the murder of his ex-wife and the judge in his divorce proceedings. Tape recordings of his conversations with an employee, who was working undercover with law enforcement, were the main evidence used against Davis. The contextualized linguistic analysis of these tapes helped lead to his acquittal.

This case is set in the cross-culture milieu of Scotland, where many Muslim families now live. Fearing that his daughter would disgrace the family by marrying outside of the Muslim cultural framework, Arshad expressed his frustration to a friend, who for an unknown reason told the police that Arshad was looking for a hit man to kill his daughter’s new husband. In the undercover conversations that followed, the policeman uses all of the conversational strategies of ambiguity, hit and run, interrupting, scripting, and refusing to take “No” for an answer.

This chapter begins by presenting cases showing that solicitation is widespread and open. Lawyers learn it from mentors and peers, as well as the cappers themselves (who often use ethnic identity to attract minority clients). Many cappers initiate and dominate the scheme, doing everything except litigate. Lawyers seek to disguise cappers as independent contractors and “investigators”, in order to preserve deniability. The arrangement is highly profitable to both sides. The chapter presents an unusually inventive method for connecting automobile injury victims with lawyers and doctors.

This chapter examines patterns of political participation more broadly across time and space. It directly compares people's likelihood of becoming active based on which political issues they consider most important. The data for this analysis are drawn from the American National Election Study data from the past three decades. The chapter asks: If we look back over the past thirty years, have the people who consider insecurity issues to be most important also been less likely to spend resources on politics than those who consider other issues to be most important? Have they been less likely to donate money to political organizations? And, if they are in the labor force, have they been less likely to volunteer as well? Moreover, do these differences remain even after we take into account other differences between the types of people who prioritize economic insecurity issues versus those who consider other issues to be most important?

The crime of asking another to commit a crime—solicitation—is punished less than attempt. But are solicitations, themselves, attempts to commit the crimes solicited? When the defendant asks an undercover detective to commit murder, has the defendant attempted murder? This chapter argues that whether a solicitor has the intention needed for an attempt turns on the nature of the completed crime. A solicitor does not attempt if completion would require the solicited party to perform an act, since the solicitor lacks an intention to perform that act. However, if completion only requires the solicited party to cause a result, then the solicitor may attempt since he intends that the result comes to pass. Defense of this position requires discussion of the “voluntary intervention principle”, according to which a party does not cause a result when he causes another to voluntarily bring it about.

This chapter studies the case of an Olympic athlete who was arrested for soliciting prostitution by a plainclothes undercover vice squad officer, who had posed as a prostitute. It first examines the police report, which relates the conversation between the athlete and the officer. It then takes a look at the prosecution's and defendant's transcription of the recording of the conversation. It notes that both the prosecution and the defense heard the athlete say very different things, and then uses phonetics in order to determine what the athlete actually said. It then identifies the three inferences made by the police and nonverbal communication that eventually played an important role in the case.

During the interwar years, the state became concerned about an escalation in the extent to which notions of promiscuity and prostitution were overlapping in public discourse. The ‘common prostitute’ had long been used as a cultural and legal reference point against which all standards of female sexual morality were judged. This marginalisation of women who worked as prostitutes was predicated on the prejudicial notion that they were different to other women. Yet, by the 1920s, changes in women’s lifestyles were challenging this form of moral categorisation, and the Street Offences Committee (1927-8) was formed to review the solicitation laws. However, this chapter argues that the creation of the Committee was not a product of concerns about the unfairness of criminalising prostitutes. Instead, the Committee was the product of the Home Office’s concern that a perceived erosion in the notional boundary between promiscuity and prostitution had made solicitation harder to police. Moreover, in paying particular attention to witness statements given to the Committee by members of the Liverpool Women Police Patrols, the chapter shows that even arguments against using the law to control prostitution did not necessarily seek to challenge the idea that the prostitute was morally transgressive.

While historians have examined how prostitution and promiscuity were frequently conflated by social purists and philanthropists in the late Victorian period and early twentieth century, this book examines the persistence of these ideas well into the latter half of the twentieth century. The notion that the respectable, young, working-class woman could be distinguished from the supposedly disreputable and corrupting prostitute produced a highly gendered understanding of urban space. Working-class women, and especially immigrant working-class women, were monitored for signs of apparent moral weakness. Moreover, even as social purity organisations went into decline in the post-war years, their ideas persisted in legislative efforts to control prostitution. Women who worked as prostitutes were increasingly regulated and pushed out of sight into less safe working spaces. As such, it is argued here that the law increasingly mirrored the sort of social purity thinking which considered prostitution to be a form of moral contagion which needed to be eradicated.

Chapter 2 begins with a fuller explanation of the rabbinic underpinnings of tum’at yadayim, and ends, contrapuntally, with Said’s reading of Conrad’s Nostromo from Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975) in dialogue with Levinas’s Talmudic reading “Promised Land of Permitted Land” from 1965. Art and ethical adventure, the difficult and the holy, are traced in suspended dialectic, such that each becomes the other’s uncanny neighbor. The sacred and secular, much like the “rub” between tradition and modernity that gives many of the authors and their writings discussed in this book their kinetic friction, become mobilized as partners in conversations rather than fixed at diametric poles. The coupling of Saidian and Levinasian critical consciousnesses, improbable as it may at first appear, obeys a similar logic.

This essay takes up suggestions by David Steinberg for closer ethical scrutiny of the complex idea of altruism in contemporary medicine. As Steinberg observes, altruism is debated in a wide range of medical contexts, including voluntary participation of healthy persons in clinical trials; donation of blood, organs, stem cells, gametes and genetic materials; and medical professionalism in the care of patients. It is defined by many issues and is in many instances not an unmitigated good. This essay explores possibilities for altruistic medicine by presenting a case study in the challenging arena of transplant tourism. The ethics of cross-border transplantation combines the problems of globalization, commercialization, and the increasing bodily invasion that is entailed by modern medicine. Along with the enduring question of altruism in medicine, these can be expected to remain live issues in the next fifty years.

After providing a semantic history of the word, “bribe” this chapter briefly traces how the definition of bribery developed from the U.S. Constitution through statutory developments in the twentieth century, including evolving ideas about what constitutes entrapment and the related conditions of “inducement,” “solicitation,” and “predisposition.” Since certain legal activities, such as lobbying, have the outward appearance of bribery, a distinction is made here. Because “conspiracy” brings with it heightened penalties, its meaning is also outlined. Evidence in bribery cases is usually audio or videotaped language that is suitable for linguistic analysis. The remainder of the chapter describes the FBI’s efforts to capture bribery in progress over the past three decades.

This chapter discusses the Model Penal Code’s provisions on the prerequisites of criminal liability, including actus reus, mens rea, omission (direct and indirect), possession (simple and compound), intoxication (voluntary and involuntary), mistake, complicity (instruments and accessorial liability), causation (but-for and legal or proximate causation), and corporate criminal liability. Inchoate offenses (attempt, conspiracy, solicitation, facilitation, and the defense of renunciation or abandonment), the de minimis defense, and protected interests (individual and public interests) are also considered. Coverage of actus reus includes the act requirement and the voluntariness requirement. Coverage of mens rea includes element types, the mens rea requirement, rules of interpretation (one-for-all, default, strict liability for violations), and modes of culpability (purpose, knowledge, recklessness, negligence, willfulness, intent, scienter).

This chapter develops the ontological implications of the fundamental nature of fluid coping for our engagement with the world. For the user, equipment is a solicitation to act, not an entity with a function feature. These solicitations make up the situation on the basis of which we sometimes step back from our involved engagement with the world and disclose entities. Human understanding thus involves an “intentional arc,” a feedback loop in which our actions and projections are drawn out of us by the meaningful features of the world and, in turn, alter the way the world shows up as soliciting us. The phenomenology of skillful coping coheres well Walter Freeman’s account of the brain as a nonlinear dynamical system.

Investment fraud is a significant problem in America. Many Baby Boomers are entering retirement with significant assets, and enforcement actions by financial regulators indicate that investors can be vulnerable to fraud at key ‘wealth events’ in their lives, such as when they face a decision about what to do with money arising from the sale of a house, an inheritance, or an IRA rollover. Protecting these assets—for Baby Boomers and younger generations who face key wealth events—will be important to ensure the financial well-being and retirement security of millions of Americans. This chapter reviews the prevalence and impact of financial and investment fraud, explores the value of using demographic characteristics, psychographic characteristics, and the number of times an individual is targeted for fraud to predict investment fraud victimization, explains how fraudsters use social influence tactics to defraud their victims, and describes current investor protection efforts.

The past two decades have seen the development, diversification, and intensification of information and communication technologies. The result is that society now has unlimited opportunity for communication and access to information. Despite the multitude of benefits, the Internet has propagated new ways to both sexually victimize and exploit children and youth in an online environment and through multiple formats including sexting, child luring and sexual solicitation, and child sexual abuse images online. This chapter explores each of these forms of child exploitation and concludes by outlining the signs and impact of online abuse.

This chapter briefly reviews the research on intentionality and predisposition, reprising how difficult it is for statutes and dictionaries to come up with comprehensive definitions, especially in cases in which the police try to prevent a murder from taking place by covertly recording a suspect before the killing can take place. Three solicitation to murder cases are described, showing how linguistic analysis of the type and sequence described in chapter 3 was used to demonstrate how the suspects’ covertly recorded conversations with undercover agents cast serious doubts on the prosecution’s attempts to convict them. The three cases were Texas v. T. Cullen Davis in Ft. Worth, Texas, The Crown v. Mohammed Arshad in Dundee, Scotland, and Washington v. Michael Mockovac in Seattle, Washington.

“A Vice of Its Virtues” explores certain problems with attempts to codify broad bases for authoritative punishment and for justifying actions. The essay focuses on the Model Penal Code. The three specific topics addressed are the right not to retreat, general justifications, and dangerous utterances. Using a few examples that appear to be covered by the Code’s language, the essay suggests that the treatment that would entail is misguided. Codifying these subjects may be desirable, and it is probably impossible to dictate the correct outcome for all conceivable situations. Nonetheless, it is helpful to be aware of these risks, and to consider the possibilities of further development of some of a criminal code’s more general provisions.