By Stephanie Holmes Didwania

Fraud is one of the most prosecuted crimes in the United States, yet scholarly and journalistic discourse about fraud and other financial crimes tends to focus on the absence of so-called “white-collar” prosecutions against wealthy executives. This Article complicates that familiar narrative. It contains the first nationwide account of how the United States actually prosecutes financial crime. It shows—contrary to dominant academic and public discourse—that the government prosecutes an enormous number of people for financial crimes and that these prosecutions disproportionately involve the least advantaged U.S. residents accused of low-level offenses. This empirical account directly contradicts the aspiration advanced by the FBI and Department of Justice that federal prosecution ought to be reserved for only the most egregious and sophisticated financial crimes. This article argues, in other words, that the term “white-collar crime” is a misnomer.

To build this empirical foundation, the Article uses comprehensive data of the roughly two million federal criminal cases prosecuted over the last three decades matched to county-level population data from the U.S. Census. It demonstrates the history, geography, and inequality that characterize federal financial crime cases, which include myriad crimes such as identity theft, mail and wire fraud, public benefits fraud, and tax fraud, to name just a few. It shows that financial crime defendants are disproportionately low-income and Black, and that this overrepresentation is not only a nationwide pattern, but also a pattern in nearly every federal district in the United States. What’s more, the financial crimes prosecuted against these overrepresented defendants are on average the least serious. This Article ends by exploring how formal law and policy, structural incentives, and individual biases could easily create a prosecutorial regime for financial crime that reinforces inequality based on race, gender, and wealth.

Northwestern Law & Econ Research Paper Forthcoming, outhern California Law Review, Vol. 97, 2024, 54 pages

By Max Gallien

Researching illegal activities, while an object of increasing interest, generates a range of methodological challenges for political scientists. Rather than an exhaustive discussion, this article provides a simple framework that structures these challenges. It highlights that illegality itself is an insufficient guide to method development and needs to be supplemented by an analysis of three further dimensions: enforcement, normalisation and ethics. The article notes that beyond providing insights into the feasibility and challenges of different methodologies, examining these dimensions also directly point researchers to key political science questions about illegal activities themselves.

 Political Science & Politics, 1-5. doi:10.1017/S1049096521000317

By Joe Mathewson

This book makes the case for the news media to take the lead in combatting key  threats to American society including racial injustice, economic disparity and climate change by adopting an “ethics of care” in reporting practices. Examining how traditional news coverage of race, economics and climate change has been dedicated to straightforward facts, the author asserts that journalism should now respond to societal needs by adopting a moral philosophy of the “ethics of care,” opening the door to empathetic yet factual and fair coverage of news events, with a goal to move public opinion to the point that politicians are persuaded to take effective action. The book charts a clear path for how this style of ethics can be applied by today’s journalists, tracing the emergence of this empathy-based ethics from feminist philosophy in the 1980s. It ultimately urges ethical news organizations to adopt the ethics of care, based on the human emotion prioritized by Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, and to pursue a more proactive, solutions-seeking coverage of current events.  

Abingdon, OXON, UK: New York: Routledge, 2022.199p.

By Otto Pipatti

While highly respected among evolutionary scholars, the sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher Edward Westermarck is now largely forgotten in the social sciences. This book is the first full study of his moral and social theory, focusing on the key elements of his theory of moral emotions as presented in The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas and summarised in Ethical Relativity. Examining Westermarck’s evolutionary approach to the human mind, the author introduces important new themes to scholarship on Westermarck, including the pivotal role of emotions in human reciprocity, the evolutionary origins of human society, social solidarity, the emergence and maintenance of moral norms and moral responsibility. With attention to Westermarck’s debt to David Hume and Adam Smith, whose views on human nature, moral sentiments and sympathy Westermarck combined with Darwinian evolutionary thinking, Morality Made Visible highlights the importance of the theory of sympathy that lies at the heart of Westermarck’s work, which proves to be crucial to his understanding of morality and human social life. A rigorous examination of Westermarck’s moral and social theory in its intellectual context, this volume connects Westermarck’s work on morality to classical sociology, to the history of evolutionism in the social and behavioural sciences, and to the sociological study of morality and emotions, showing him to be the forerunner of modern evolutionary psychology and anthropology. In revealing the lasting value of his work in understanding and explaining a wide range of moral phenomena, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology and psychology with interests in social theory, morality and intellectual history.

Oxon, Abingdon, UK: New York; Routledge, 2020. 150p.

By John Kleinig, Peter Mameli, Seumas Miller, Douglas Salane and Adina Schwartz

This study is principally concerned with the ethical dimensions of identity management technology – electronic surveillance, the mining of personal data, and profiling – in the context of transnational crime and global terrorism. The ethical challenge at the heart of this study is to establish an acceptable and sustainable equilibrium between two central moral values in contemporary liberal democracies, namely, security and privacy. Both values are essential to individual liberty, but they come into conflict in times when civil order is threatened, as has been the case from late in the twentieth century, with the advent of global terrorism and trans-national crime. We seek to articulate legally sustainable, politically possible, and technologically feasible, global ethical standards for identity management technology and policies in liberal democracies in the contemporary global security context. Although the standards in question are to be understood as global ethical standards potentially to be adopted not only by the United States, but also by the European Union, India, Australasia, and other contemporary liberal democratic states, we take as our primary focus the tensions that have arisen between the United States and the European Union.

Canberra: ANU Press, 2011. 304p.

By Philip Rothrock, Laura Weatherer, Kate Ellis, Leah Samberg, Stephen Donofrio, Ciro Calderon

Over the past few decades, cocoa production has emerged as a driver of land use change, particularly in West Africa. In addition to its significant contributions to deforestation, cocoa production has also faced intense public scrutiny due to human rights violations, especially the use of child labor.

In Trends in the Implementation of Ethical Supply Chains: A 2020 Snapshot of the Cocoa Sector, Forest Trends’ Supply Change Initiative joined the Accountability Framework Initiative (AFi) to shed light on current trends in implementing best practice for achieving ethical supply chains across the cocoa sector. For this analysis, Supply Change researched and analyzed company sustainability commitments, production and procurement policies, and progress reporting against the common approaches for pursuing ethical supply chains outlined in the Accountability Framework.

Washington, DC: Forest-Trends, 2021. 22p.

Edited by Carol Hagemann-White, Liz Kelly, Thomas Meysen

This book offers insights and perspectives from a study of “Cultural Encounters in Intervention Against Violence” (CEINAV) in four EU-countries. Seeking a deeper understanding of the underpinnings of intervention practices in Germany, Portugal, Slovenia and the United Kingdom, the team explored variations in institutional structures and traditions of law, policing, and social welfare. Theories of structural inequality and ethics are discussed and translated into practice

Leverkusen-Opladen: Verlag Barbara Budrich, 2019. 282p.