BRINGING WHITE-COLLAR CRIME BACK IN: AN EXAMINATION OF CRIMES AND TORTS*

Criminologists have paid little attention to the study of civil law, a subject closely related to the conceptualization of white-collar crime. Because white-collar violations are generally treated as civil wrongs it has been erroneously assumed that they are not criminal acts. But often there is no difference between criminal and civil law in the way liability is determined, the moral judgments made of violations, the purposes of sanctions, the objects they protect, and in the actual behaviors regulated by these two bodies of law. Crime and tort are no longer meaningful labels for classifying either the underlying behaviors nor the type of legal actions or reactions to these behaviors. A solution to this dilemma is to separate the study of organization and causation of the behavior from a consideration of how the behavior is defined.