ELH Blogger: Congratulations on the recent publication of your book Inducing Intimacy: Deception, Consent, and the Law with Cambridge University Press. Can you give us the elevator pitch for interested readers?
Prof. Chloë Kennedy: Yes! The book is about the legal regulation of what I call ‘deceptively induced intimacy’. In a nutshell, ‘deceptively induced intimacy’ is deception (a term I define broadly to include failing to disclose information, misleading conduct and lies) that occurs when a person decides to engage in sexual activity or enter a sexual and / or romantic relationship. The book looks at how this conduct has been punished and compensated across a period of 250 years. It shows how we have got to the point where some kinds of deceptively induced intimacy attract the law’s attention and some don’t, and tries to answer the questions of whether and why the law should be used to deal with this type of behaviour today.
ELHB: How interesting! How important has the historical dimension of induced intimacy, and methodologies for examining that dimension, been to the project?
CK: It has been crucial. Even though the impetus for the book was a contemporary problem — the contentious and confusing use of the criminal law to punish deceptive sex — my approach was deeply historical. I had two aims in undertaking the project, and history underpins the way I have fulfilled both of them. My first aim was to better understand how deceptive sex has come to appear as a problem that deserves a punitive legal response. This dimension of the project required me to identify and analyse all the areas of law that have been used to deal with deceptively induced intimacy and how these have changed over time. I accomplished this by drawing on a large amount of empirical data, which I gathered from archives, newspapers, legal journals, reported cases, textbooks and treatises, and then contextualising this using a mix of primary and secondary sources. This allowed me to produce what I consider to be a suitably nuanced legal historical account. My second aim was to critique contemporary legal developments and suggest an alternative way forward. In undertaking this dimension of the project I used the legal doctrinal and theoretical insights generated by my historical account. Put simply, I argue that the laws I examined have reflected prevailing ideas about what makes sex and intimate relationships valuable and that this association has ensured that certain features of the law – the relationship between deception and consent, for example – ‘work’. I then build on this argument to suggest that we might develop a similarly culturally-informed account for our present era and use this to help guide the future develop of the law.
Stay tuned for details of the book launch event hosted by the Centre for Legal History in early 2025!
Inducing Intimacy is available for purchase at https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/inducing-intimacy/309A21A4E7F975BDE7FAE39B607B84E6
