Lying, Cheating and Stealing: A Moral Theory of White-Collar Crime by STUART

‘White-collar crime’ is a broad and loose description of a wide variety of crimes and activities. One of the key difficulties in attempting to analyse crimes in this area has been a lack of theoretical models with which to evaluate offences. A further criticism that has been made about these crimes has been the variety of mental elements needed to prove the offences, and, at times, an underlying moral ambivalence about the very criminality of the prohibited conduct. Green argues that this ambivalence manifests itself in three ways: the same conduct may often be prosecuted criminally or civilly, depending on the prosecutor’s discretion; actions that fall within the centre of the prescribed scope of conduct may be clearly criminal, while other actions that fall at the edges of the scope of the conduct as defined may well be considered legal; and, in some cases, even activities that constitute the core behaviour prohibited may be criminalised, despite a lack of a community consensus that the activity is wrong or a belief that it is not seriously wrong enough to amount to a crime.1 It is this ambivalence that Green sees as making the area an important one for legal theory, particularly because of what it may be able to tell us about the appropriate boundaries for the criminal law. As white-collar crime inhabits the edges of what is seen to be criminal, Green attempts to develop a moral theory that can serve to describe which activities in this area should, and should not be, visited with criminal sanctions in Part I of his book. Admitting that the meaning of ‘white-collar crime’ has been from its inception uncertain and contested, Green limits his use of the term to activities that are prohibited by the criminal law.2 He admits that if the area of law had not already been so strongly embedded with the term, he would have preferred a more precise moniker. However, he draws on Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblances to suggest that much of what is described as white-collar crime as a group shares a set of common characteristics, though each characteristic might not be found in each offence.3 Consequently, this allows him to describe these crimes in terms of characteristics they predominantly share, but allows him to use the variable appearance of the characteristics in each offence as a way of further examining the moral bases of the offences. Green sees these shared characteristics as: a reduced role for mens rea; a more abstract and diffuse form of harm caused by