The Frontiers of Legal Analysis: Reframing the Transition in Northern Ireland

British constitutional legal discourse is structurally limited in its capacity to capture the complexity of the Good Friday Agreement. Rather than assessing the Agreement in narrow devolutionary terms, it should be seen as a hybrid domestic and international law instrument, making an important contribution to accepted international law norms in relation to self-determination. The Agreement transforms and partly transcends the Northern Ireland conflict by substituting political contestation for violent conflict, and by defining the modalities of conducting that contestation. This analysis complements classical international law perspectives, and opens up the application of legal discourses associated with 'transitional justice' to the legal and political transformation in Northern Ireland. These discourses focus on the problem of reconciling the demands of peace with the imperatives of justice. The Agreement sits squarely in this terrain with its provisions on 'dealing with the past' and 'institutional legacies'. The insights gained here challenge orthodox thinking about conflict-management and the ongoing political process.     

From fiddle factors to networks of collusion: Charting the waters of small business crime

Small business crime has been largely ignored in American criminology; studies of nontraditional crime have focused mainly on corporate crime or on the misdeeds of employees pursuing personal gain. This paper calls for criminologists to redirect their efforts toward the systematic study of small business crime. In particular, it advocates in-depth qualitative studies that explore small business culture and opportunity structures, and that examine the networks of collusion that subvert the legitimate economy. The paper concludes with illustrations from an own story currently being shared with the author by a small businessman who participated for five years in an urban crime network that infiltrated the redistributive economy.