Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Should an Accessory to Fraud Be Able to Sue for Damages?

Via @NinjaEconomics, a story of a woman taking cheaters' site Ashley Madison to court to the tune of $20M for a personal injury suit.

ATSRTWT

How about them apples for moral intuition? The plaintiff can hardly be said to have clean hands, but the defendant is, well let's be generous and call them morally suspect.

But was the labor contract itself legitimate to begin with? It was basically a conspiracy to commit fraud, right? That's a void contract in the eyes of the law (in US jurisdictions anyway, at least as I understand it). Do any of my readers know what the Canadian jurisprudence on this is?

At any rate, it's pretty clear that the services the site offers isn't particularly euvoluntary (since I believe that the underlying commodity remains in breach of standard marriage contracts), and this particular service (writing fugazi profiles) is further out of the euvoluntary bounds (last I checked, the ol' two-worngs-don't-make-a-right rule still applies).

What do you think? If you had to choose between the two, where would your moral sympathies lie? And if you were on the jury, would you let those sympathies bias your judgement according to the letter and spirit of the law?

No comments:

Post a Comment

Do you have suggestions on where we could find more examples of this phenomenon?