Professor Hasday’s Intimate Lies and the Law Wins Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Family and Relationships

Intimate Lies and the Law, Professor Jill Hasday’s acclaimed book on the laws governing our closest personal relationships, won a gold medal in the annual Foreword INDIES Book of the Year series. Hasday’s book, published by Oxford University Press in 2019, took top honors in the family and relationships category. It also won a bronze medal in the women’s studies category. The Foreword INDIES are open to books published by university or independent presses. This year, more than 2,100 titles were entered in 55 categories.

Intimate Lies and the Law is the first book to uncover the hidden body of law governing deception in dating, sex, marriage, and family life. People often assume that intimate deception is a quintessentially private phenomenon that courts and legislatures leave untouched. Hasday reveals how the legal system pervasively regulates deception within intimacy. She argues that the law has placed too much emphasis on protecting intimate deceivers and too little importance on helping the people they deceive.

In April, the book won the Scribes Book Award from the American Society of Legal Writers for “the best work of legal scholarship published during the previous year.”

Hasday is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor and the Centennial Professor of Law at the Law School. Her previous book, Family Law Reimagined, was published by Harvard University Press in 2014. Her articles have appeared in many leading law reviews, including the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, New York University Law Review, Michigan Law Review, California Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, and Minnesota Law Review.