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April 26, 2006

A New Book on White Collar Criminality

I
n teaching criminal law, I've always been struck by how our conceptualizations of mens rea (guilty mental states) come from crimes (especially crimes of violence) in which both the guilty acts (the "actus reus") and the victim's harm are pretty clear and uncontroversial. So many of the crimes that my office (the US Attorney's Office in NJ) prosecuted didn't fit this mold. Political corruption cases, bank fraud, health care fraud, mail and wire fraud -- so many of these cases presented tough questions about the line between guilt and innocence, between "aggressive business" and "criminality."

Stuart Green has a new book out from Oxford U. Press, "Lying, Cheating, and Stealing: A Moral Theory of White Collar Crime," that promises to help us think through these tough questions of white-collar criminality more carefully. I've not yet read it, but plan to. If you're in the field, you ought to look it over!

Posted by Eric at April 26, 2006 9:45 AM

Comments

Lex would be a lot more centesimusus if it didn't credo on a lot of verbum obscuris.

Posted by: K at April 26, 2006 12:05 PM

No one thinks they are guilty till they get caught.

Posted by: Bob at April 26, 2006 5:48 PM

This article by the same author is interesting:
Green, Stuart - The Concept of White Collar Crime in Law and Legal Theory, 8 Buffalo Crim. L. Rev. 1 (2004). The subject really needs a book length treatment :)

Posted by: Simon Spero at April 26, 2006 7:22 PM