Reading Comprehension

PT135 · S3 · P3 · Q16 Blackmail Laws

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The following passages are adapted from articles recently published in North American law review journals.

Topic

The legal reasoning behind why blackmail is (or isn't) considered a crime in different legal traditions.

Framework

Present Debate (two approaches to blackmail: North American law grapples with a "paradox," while Roman law frames blackmail differently)

Main Point

Passage A: Blackmail is paradoxical in North American law because it combines two legal actions into an illegal one, but its criminality can be justified by the misuse of third-party leverage. *(Most valuable sentences: , and )* Passage B: Roman law avoided the blackmail paradox by valuing whether actions caused harm, not just their legality, and placed the burden on the possessor of shameful information to justify disclosure, even if the information was true.

P1A: Blackmail Paradox Introduced

Both the U.S. and Canadian laws find blackmail odd because it criminalizes two actions (asking for money and threatening to disclose information) that are each legal on their own, raising the question: why is their combination illegal?

P2A: Problems Without a Theory

Because legal theory hasn't satisfactorily explained blackmail, laws are overly broad and rely on prosecutors to use discretion in enforcement.

P3A: Author’s Solution: Third-Party Leverage

The real issue with blackmail is its “triangular” structure—the blackmailer uses a threat of outside harm (like state prosecution or public shame) as leverage, which is why it should be criminalized.

16.

Which one of the following statements is most strongly supported by information given in the passages?

Correct
In Roman law, there was
Why this is right
The idea of the blackmail paradox in US / Canadian law is that you have the right to tell someone's embarrassing secret (because of free speech) and you have the right to seek money. But when you combine the idea of seeking money or else you'll tell someone's embarrassing secret, then it somehow becomes a crime called blackmail. Meanwhile, in Roman law, they didn't have a special category / crime called blackmail. They didn't need to say, "Sure, you're allowed, via free speech protection, to say an embarrassing secret someone else is keeping, but if you charge money for it, then it becomes an illegal thing called blackmail." Instead, in their system they would just assess whether a given action caused harm or not. Revealing someone's embarrassing secret was assumed to be harmful to them. If revealing their secret would harm their status or reputation, then revealing their secret was unlawful (as was threatening to do so). Your "right" to reveal someone's secret wasn't protected by free speech. It could be against the law for you to utter this secret if doing so would harm the person. As the beginning of the 3rd paragraph of B says, assertion of the truth of the shameful fact being revealed was not, in itself, sufficient to constitute a legal privilege. Meanwhile, in US / Canadian law, you are allowed to reveal the shameful fact. If it's true, you're not guilty of slander or libel, and free speech protections grant you the right to say it.
Skill tested: Inference · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.
54% picked this
Blackmail was more widely practiced
Unknown Comparison
If anything we would guess that blackmail was less frequently practiced in Rome, since revealing a shameful fact about someone was illegal in and of itself, before you even added on the unsavory quality of extorting money out of your victim. But the passages don't allow us to directly compare frequency.
4% picked this
In general, Canadian and U.S.
Too Strong: in general Unknown Comparison
We only know that when it comes to free speech protection, Canadian and US law grant more freedoms, insofar as their legal systems grant the freedom to reveal a shameful but true fact about someone else, whereas Roman law does not grant this freedom. But we wouldn't be able to comment on whether the sum total of Canadian / US common law granted more freedoms than did classical Roman law.
7% picked this
The best justification for the
Opposite Too Strong: best
The author never labels the "best" way to justify the illegality, but the only one she proposes (and thus presumably the one she considers most salient) has nothing to do with damage to the victim's reputation. In fact that language is ripped out of passage B's 2nd paragraph. Passage A is saying that the justification for the illegality is the triangular structure: you're "earning" money by using someone else's leverage. You're not extracting money from someone because of a service or property you provided them. You're extracting money by not putting them in danger of facing repercussions from some third party. Their fear of that third party is the leverage you're using, and so you're kind of abusing the system by "stealing" the state's leverage in order to extract value from the person being blackmailed.
4% picked this
Unlike Roman law, Canadian and
Too Strong
Just because the "interest of public authorities of having certain info revealed" is language that is only used at the end of Passage B doesn't mean we can assume that Canadian and US law don't ever recognize the same interest. We probably know from outside knowledge that Canadian and US law will allow judges to issue warrants or subpoenas that allow federal authorities to obtain or reveal information that's important to an investigation. To say that North American legal systems do not in any way recognize that public authorities may sometimes have an interest in having certain information revealed would be a very extreme, unlikely claim.
31% picked this

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