From deuteronomy to deniability: A historical perlustration on white-collar crime

The history of social efforts to deal with offenses now categorized as white-collar crime shows a struggle for justice and equity with roots deep in the past. This paper uses a triad of English marketing offenses—forestalling, regrating, and engrossing—to epitomize the legal background of efforts to control the abuse of commercial power. The paper notes the spurious ancestry of the doctrine of caveat emptor, and offers explanations for the decline and the subsequent revival of crusades against the exploitation of consumers by business forces. Scholarly work on white-collar crime is placed in this historical context, followed by a general appraisal of the nature of changes over time—from the dire biblical prophecies in Deuteronomy to the bland explanations of “plausible deniability” during the recent Iran-Contra hearings before the U.S. Congress.