We will hear argument first this morning in case 23909, Cossesis versus United States.

Mr. Fisher.

Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court, the property fraud statutes require a scheme to defraud as understood at the common law.

And such traditional fraud requires a scheme, if completed as dev devised to harm a traditional property interest.

And our position is no such harm occurs if somebody pays money in exchange for something

and gets the full economic value of that bargain. The government asks this court to chart a

different path. It argues that a property interest is harmed in a property

fraud case whenever somebody gives money pursuant to a fraudulent misrepresentation.

That would cause three major problems. First, it would flout decades of this court's precedent. Indeed, it would

allow prosecutions just like McNally, Simonelli, the hypothetical and skilling, and others that

the court has said are beyond the reach of the fraud statutes. Second, the theory is incompatible

with the historical origins of fraud. In an 1893 case, it's representative of the time, the Kansas Supreme Court said,

even though money is obtained by misrepresentation, if no injury occurs, no crime is committed.

That sentence is incomprehensible under the rule the government argues today,

which says that any time there's misrepresentation that procures money, that itself is injury.

And thirdly, and perhaps most decisively, the government's theory knows no bounds.

Every day across the country, people use white lies, puffery, and other fraudulent promises to induce people to enter into transactions.

But if there's no harm that occurs in those transactions, there is no fraud.

That's what the government, I'm sorry, that's what this Court has said time and again in this

court's cases, as the government has tried to concoct one theory after the other

to work around that. Such misrepresentations might be a civil violation, they might be a tort

violation, a contract violation. They might even be a low-level criminal violation. But the one thing

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