On Trust, Law, and Expecting the Worst

Abstract

A man says he will marry a woman, while he's secretly involved with someone else, just long enough to get her brother's kidney. The couple sets a date, and the kidney transplant takes place. Riding home from the hospital, the groom-to-be announces the engagement is indefinitely postponed. A year later, he marries the other woman (p. 30).

An American woman meets a Soviet man on a cultural exchange program and, after he professes his love and proposes, she marries him. She spends the next three-and-a-half years working to help him immigrate to the United States, paying $15,000 in expenses and dedicating approximately twenty hours per week to his immigration admin, delaying the completion of her doctorate and thus diminishing her income. After her husband's successful immigration, she learns that he lied about his feelings and intentions; he was merely using her as a conduit to legal immigration (pp. 80-81).

An eighteen-year-old girl is in a debilitating car accident and spends the next two years recuperating in her parents' home.6 During that time, she receives a $63,000 settlement check from the driver of the car, which she entrusts to her father. Contrary to her mother's report that the money is "being held in an investment account for her benefit,"7 the daughter learns later that her parents had spent $30,000 on themselves - which was the entire sum remaining after paying for her medical bills and car (p. 18o).$

These plaintiffs' accounts populate the pages of Professor Jill Hasday's Intimate Lies and the Law (pp. 30, 80-81, 18o-81).9 And like most of the plaintiffs discussed by Hasday, they lose in court.