Article on Undue Influence: The Gap Between Current Law and Scientific Approaches to Decision-Making and Persuasion

Dominic J. Campisi, Evan D. Winet, & Jake Calvert recently published an Article entitled, Undue Influence: The Gap Between Current Law and Scientific Approaches to Decision-Making and Persuasion, 43 ACTEC L.J. 359 (Spring 2018). Provided below is an abstract of the Article:

“And the devil hath power t’assume a pleasing shape. Yea, and perhaps out of my weakness and my melancholy, as he is very potent with such spirits, abuses me to damn me.”

Financial elder abuse encompasses a broad set of situations and misconduct involving the vulnerability of disabled and aged individuals to predation by relatives, employees, strangers and professionals. Financial elder abuse is an offshoot of long-standing principles and remedies for undue influence and fraud in estate planning and gifts, as well as disputes over enforcement of contracts and unjust enrichment.

English Courts, as any viewer of Masterpiece Theatre, or reader of Dickens or Trollope knows, have long dealt with undue influence. Francis Bacon, ruling in the High Court of Chancery in 1617, found undue influence where the 80 year old George Lydiatt, “being weak of body and understanding and having a great estate of goods and lands” was influenced by Anne, who

did so work upon his simplicity and weakness and by her dalliance and pretence [sic] of love unto him and of intention after the death of her then husband to marry him, and by sundry adulterous courses with him and sorcery and kindred, telling him something they would poison him and sometimes that they would rob him, whereby she obtained his personal estate by transfers and execution of a will disinheriting his kindred?