Lying, Cheating, and Stealing

The picture of crime that dominates the popular imagination is one of unambiguous wrong-doing - manifestly harmful acts that are clearly worthy of condemnation. The accompanying picture of the criminal - the thief, the murderer - is a picture of society's failures - to be cast out and re-integrated through a process of punishment and penance. Our understanding of white-collar crime, by contrast, is pervaded by moral and imaginative ambiguity. Such crimes arecommitted by society's success stories, by the rich and the powerful, and frequently have no visible victim at their root. The problem of marrying these disparate pictures has led to a confusion of the boundaries of white-collar crime. How is it possible to distinguish criminal fraud from mere lawful"puffing", tax evasion from "tax avoidance", insider trading from "savvy investing", obstruction of justice from "zealous advocacy", bribery from "log rolling", and extortion from "hard bargaining"? How should we, as scholars and students, lawyers and judges, law enforcement officials and the general public, distinguish the lawful from the unlawful, the civil from the criminal?In the first in-depth study of its kind, Stuart Green exposes the ambiguities and uncertainties that pervade the white-collar crimes, and offers an approach to their solution. Drawing on recent cases involving such figures as Martha Stewart, Bill Clinton, Tom DeLay, Scooter Libby, Jeffrey Archer, Enron's Kenneth Lay and Andrew Fastow, and the Arthur Anderson accounting firm, Green weaves together disparate threads of the criminal code to reveal a complex and fascinating web of moral insightsabout the nature of guilt and innocence and what, fundamentally, constitutes conduct worthy of punishment by criminal sanction.Green argues that white-collar crime is best understood through a framework of everyday moral concepts that include not only lying, cheating and stealing, but also coercion, exploitation, disloyalty, promise-breaking, disobediance, and other forms of deception. In the process, he reveals the essentially moral fabric underlying the legal category of white-collar crime.

'This book marks a real advance in normative theorising about the moral foundations of the criminal law: it should provoke theorists to think not just about murder, but about insider trading; not just about rape, but about tax evasion - and about the wide range of regulatory offences' whose moral content has been so under-explored. This is an important book, which opens up the vast field of 'white-collar crime' to deep normative theorising - theorising that is informed by an acute grasp of the legal issues and by a thorough philosophical grounding.', 'This is a long needed and pathbreaking consideration of white-collar crime from the perspective of a top-notch legal scholar. Stuart Green has absorbed knowledge in his own specialty and in the social sciences to provide a comprehensive and integrated understanding of behaviour that has been capturing headlines in the American media. Tough issues, long bypassed, come in for sophisticated scrutiny. I am certain that Lying, Cheating and Stealing will come to stand as a classic contribution to the study of law-breaking by the priveleged. ', 'Mr. Green's book admirably clears away much of the conceptual underbrush surrounding the idea of white-collar crime.... "Lying, Cheating, and Stealing" is strong on moral philosophy, not least in the way it illuminates the gray areas of business conduct. ... [it] will be helpful to anyone thinking about such cases [as Kenneth Lay's].'

Stuart Green is Professor of Law and Justice Nathan L. Jacobs Scholar, Rutgers School of Law, Newark. A graduate of Yale Law School, he has served as a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in the United Kingdom and as a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan Law School. He is co-editor, along with R.A. Duff, of Defining Crimes: Essays on the Special Part of the Criminal Law, published by OUP in 2005.