Spoofing: Law, materiality and boundary work in futures trading

Spoofing (canonically: ‘bidding or offering with the intent to cancel bid offer before execution’), once a valued skill in face-to-face trading, has become crime punishable by jail. Echoing Riles’s call for greater attention law research on finance, this paper analyses interwoven processes of dramatic shift, including trading’s changing material form, contingencies such as Congressional response global financial crisis, and, above all, use criminal (not just civil, administrative) law. Criminal law's particularly strong boundary work – specifically first indictment and jail sentence spoofing rendered earlier ambivalent attitudes inconsistent enforcement untenable. Nevertheless, drawing between legitimate trading remains work-in-progress, simultaneously legal, moral dimensions.