Wednesday, November 17, 2021

Kadens on a 1613 Star Chamber Fraud Case

Emily Kadens, Northwestern University School of Law, has posted A Marine Insurance Fraud in the Star Chamber, which appears in Star Chamber Matters: The Court and Its Records, ed. K.J. Kesselring and Natalie Mears (2021), 155-174:

The Star Chamber was an active forum for litigating cases of fraud in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. But some complaints alleging fraud were themselves fraudulent. This book chapter provides a detailed study of a 1613 Star Chamber suit claiming marine insurance fraud against London- and Amsterdam-based merchant insurers, which was allegedly committed in Livorno, Italy by two Portuguese crypto-Jews and a young English merchant. But did the fraud actually occur, or did the accuser invent the whole story?

--Dan Ernst