Kousisis v. United States — 605 U.S. 114 (2025) · Supreme Court of the United States · 2025

Role: applied; posture: criminal; jury convictions on three wire fraud counts and a 1349 conspiracy (disadvantaged-business pass-through on two PennDOT painting contracts); judgment of acquittal denied, affirmed by CA3; certiorari on whether fraudulent inducement without intended net economic loss is wire fraud; result: claimant-won; claim:

Uncertainty

None recorded

Misfit

The core holding is the REJECTION of a proposed requirement (intended net economic loss); v1 can only show it as a satisfied `property` block plus rule quotes and a second, rule-announced `property` block whose variant names the rejected requirement. Known gap (rule-announced has no content type; "X is not an element").

The rejected requirement could be phrased under three declared elements (scheme, property, intent); the Court treats it under money-or-property, so it is recorded only under `property` and `intent` is left bare not-reached. Splitting scheme from property is the annotator's choice: the same passage ("Take the facts of this very case") decides scheme and property together.

materiality carries two things with different status: a concession on the facts (satisfied [conceded]) and a reserved question of law (which materiality test). One basis per block; known gap.

The IR text is a single 60000-char paragraph of a preliminary print: quotes contain line-break hyphenation ("Penn- DOT", "mil- lion"), dropped ligatures ("proft", "satisfed") and must dodge running heads ("Page Proof Pending Publication") that fall mid-sentence; several otherwise better sentences were unusable for that reason. The first ~8000 chars are the reporter's syllabus, not the opinion; no quote is taken from it.

Three separate opinions (Thomas concurring, doubting materiality on these facts; Gorsuch concurring in part, proposing an injury requirement; Sotomayor concurring in the judgment) are not recorded: v1 has no scope for a concurrence, and the text is capped at 60000 chars inside Thomas's concurrence, so Gorsuch and Sotomayor are not in the IR text at all.

Count 4 (18 U.S.C. 1349 conspiracy) is affirmed on the same reasoning; another statute, not recorded. wire / interstate / furtherance were not in issue and get no block.

interpretation

Obtaining the victim's money or property must have been the “aim,” not an “incidental byproduct,” of the defendant's fraud.

Kousisis v. United States — 605 U.S. 114 (2025) · Supreme Court of the United States · 2025 (18usc1341: author: unavailable · not independently reviewed)

Obtaining the victim's money or property must have been the “aim,” not an “incidental byproduct,” of the defendant's fraud.

Judicial construction of the statutory property/object requirement: the property target must be an object of the scheme, not merely an incidental expense of exercising regulatory power. Traditional intangible property can qualify; intangible regulatory interests and a free-standing right to control economic decisions cannot. Kousisis preserves Ciminelli and Kelly while rejecting a net-economic-loss requirement. Its holding applies to the identical mail-fraud language (605 U.S. 114, 121 n.2).

interpretation

In short, the wire fraud statute is agnostic about economic loss. The statute does not so much as mention loss, let alone require it.

Kousisis v. United States — 605 U.S. 114 (2025) · Supreme Court of the United States · 2025 (18usc1341: author: unavailable · not independently reviewed)

In short, the wire fraud statute is agnostic about economic loss. The statute does not so much as mention loss, let alone require it.

Judicial construction of the statutory property/object requirement: the property target must be an object of the scheme, not merely an incidental expense of exercising regulatory power. Traditional intangible property can qualify; intangible regulatory interests and a free-standing right to control economic decisions cannot. Kousisis preserves Ciminelli and Kelly while rejecting a net-economic-loss requirement. Its holding applies to the identical mail-fraud language (605 U.S. 114, 121 n.2).

interpretation

Obtaining the victim's money or property must have been the “aim,” not an “incidental byproduct,” of the defendant's fraud.

Kousisis v. United States — 605 U.S. 114 (2025) · Supreme Court of the United States · 2025 (18usc1343: author: Fable · historical QA: FIX (QA2, neov2/qa/wave2-cases-QA2.md) · changed after review; current content not independently reviewed)

Obtaining the victim's money or property must have been the “aim,” not an “incidental byproduct,” of the defendant's fraud.

Judicial construction of the statutory property/object requirement: the property target must be an object of the scheme, not merely an incidental expense of exercising regulatory power. Traditional intangible property can qualify; intangible regulatory interests and a free-standing right to control economic decisions cannot. Kousisis preserves Ciminelli and Kelly while rejecting a net-economic-loss requirement.

interpretation

In short, the wire fraud statute is agnostic about economic loss. The statute does not so much as mention loss, let alone require it.

Kousisis v. United States — 605 U.S. 114 (2025) · Supreme Court of the United States · 2025 (18usc1343: author: Fable · historical QA: FIX (QA2, neov2/qa/wave2-cases-QA2.md) · changed after review; current content not independently reviewed)

In short, the wire fraud statute is agnostic about economic loss. The statute does not so much as mention loss, let alone require it.

Judicial construction of the statutory property/object requirement: the property target must be an object of the scheme, not merely an incidental expense of exercising regulatory power. Traditional intangible property can qualify; intangible regulatory interests and a free-standing right to control economic decisions cannot. Kousisis preserves Ciminelli and Kelly while rejecting a net-economic-loss requirement.

interpretation

We need not settle the debate here, however, because Alpha and Kousisis have not contested that their misrepresentations were material.

Kousisis v. United States — 605 U.S. 114 (2025) · Supreme Court of the United States · 2025 (18usc1343: author: Fable · historical QA: FIX (QA2, neov2/qa/wave2-cases-QA2.md) · changed after review; current content not independently reviewed)

We need not settle the debate here, however, because Alpha and Kousisis have not contested that their misrepresentations were material.

Judge-made incorporation of common-law fraud, not an express word in this statute. Kousisis leaves unresolved the parties' competing formulations of the materiality standard; it does not adopt an essence-of-the-bargain test as an additional universal element.