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Blackmail
Blackmail is the crime of threatening to reveal substantially true information about a person to the public, a family member, or associates unless a demand made upon the victim is met. This information is usually of an embarrassing or socially damaging nature. As the information is substantially true, the act of revealing the information may not be criminal in its own right nor amount to a civil law defamation; the crime is making demands to withhold it.
Blackmail is similar to extortion—the difference being that extortion involves an underlying, independent criminal act, while blackmail does not.
The word is derived from the word for tribute paid by English and Scottish border dwellers to Border Reivers in return for immunity from raids. This tribute was paid in goods or labour (reditus nigri, or "blackmail"): the opposite is blanche firmes or reditus albi, or "white rent" (denoting payment by silver).
Blackmail and extortion
C&F questions why either of these things can or should be crimes. I agree. Why can?t people offer to not exercise a First Amendment right for cash? Hell, most of us agree to waive constitutional rights in exchange for compensation...
Berman on Blackmail
Mitchell N. Berman has posted Blackmail (THE OXFORD HANDBOOK ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE CRIMINAL LAW, Oxford University Press, 2009) on SSRN...
Blackmail, Extortion, and the First Amendment
Why is blackmail a crime? More importantly, how can blackmail be criminalize in light of the First Amendment? Here is how the federal blackmail statute reads: Whoever, under a threat of informing, or as a consideration for not informing, against any violation of any law of the United States, demands or receives any money or other valuable thing, shall be...
When Will The Blackmail Threats Begin?
Obama is already sending not-so-coded messages to the civil rights establishment that his election will not reduce the need, and his support, for continued race preference policies...
Pc jailed over blackmail attempts
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EPA's "environmental blackmail"
The agency's carbon dioxide endangerment ruling "is an attempt to force Congress's hand," writes Max Schulz at City Journal...
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