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Blackmail, Privacy, and Freedom of Contract
Abstract
By "blackmail," I mean the attempt to trade silence for money.The term is sometimes used in law as the equivalent of extortion, which is the extraction of money by threats generally, of which threats to reveal incriminating or embarrassing information are a subset.Shavell's article in this Symposium analyzes threats in general as well as blackmail; I discuss other threats too, but only in passing.The descriptive literature on blackmail is sparse.The best work is probably MIKE HEPwORTH, BLACKMAIL: PUBLIcITY AND SECRECY IN EVERYDAY LIFE (1975), but it is limited to British law.For philosophical discussions of blackmail that are partially parallel to the economic analysis of this Article, see JOEL FEINBERG,
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Citations
Cited by
Acquisti, A., Taylor, C., & Wagman, L. (2016) · Journal of Economic Literature · doi:10.1257/jel.54.2.442 · Cited by 1,283
Sunstein, C. R. (1999) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.199668 · Cited by 384
The Long-Run Growth in Obesity as a Function of Technological Change
Posner, R. A., & Philipson, T. J. (1999) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.167008 · Cited by 254
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Posner, R. A.
- Venue
- University of Pennsylvania Law Review
- Publisher
- JSTOR
- Published
- 1993-05
- Volume
- 141
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 1817
- ISSN
- 0041-9907 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4250239178
- Cited by
- 169
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 1.18
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Posner, R. A. (1993). Blackmail, Privacy, and Freedom of Contract. University of Pennsylvania Law Review. https://doi.org/10.2307/3312575
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
