Myths and Misunderstandings in White-Collar Crime

For years, commentators have complained that white-collar crime is both over-criminalized and underenforced. This book transcends that debate and argues that white-collar crime's weaknesses arise out of a series of interlocking pathologies: in lawmaking, in enforcement, and in how we track and discuss enforcement.

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Myths and Misunderstandings in White-Collar Crime uses real-world examples to explore the pathologies that hamper our ability to understand and redress white-collar crime. The book argues that misinterpretations about federal white-collar crime impede its lawmaking, enforcement, and discourse, leading it to be overcriminalized and underenforced. Many of these pathologies can be traced to the federal code's failure to subdivide white-collar crimes by degrees of severity, and by the legislature's outsourcing of criminal lawmaking to other institutions. With deep knowledge of the federal code and theories of institutional design and behavioral psychology at her disposal, Miriam Baer offers a step-by-step framework for redressing these problems by paying greater attention to how we write, frame, and lay out our federal criminal code. A clearer, subdivided criminal code, she argues, paves the way for more informed and productive deliberation, and fewer myths and misunderstandings.