Taking market crime seriously

Farmer, L. (2022) Taking market crime seriously. Legal Studies, 42(3), pp. 508-524. (doi: 10.1017/lst.2022.2)

Abstract

There has been a transformation in the number and the scope of criminal laws relating to forms of market misconduct. Surprisingly, however, this area of criminal law is not one that has been systematically explored in recent writing about criminalisation. However, concepts such as white-collar crime, or financial crime, which are widely used to describe this area, are poorly defined and offer little analytic clarity. This paper argues that to take market crimes seriously it is necessary to focus on what is distinctive about markets and about market misconduct as a form of wrongdoing. This allows us to see the area as a whole and identify certain common features based on central institutional features of markets and the role that criminal law has played in protecting them – notably ensuring competition, preventing exploitation, and embedding trust. This approach, then, can be a means of raising wider questions about our understanding of the relationship between criminal law and the market in modern society – and the role that criminal law can or should play in regulating those markets.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Farmer, Professor Lindsay
• Authors: Farmer, L.
• College/School: College of Social Sciences > School of Law
• Journal Name: Legal Studies
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• ISSN: 0261-3875
• ISSN (Online): 1748-121X
• Published Online: 02 March 2022
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2022 The Author
• First Published: First published in Legal Studies 42(3): 508-524
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence