Legal responsiveness: a contribution to a structural theory of economic crime

Abstract

Economic crime is too varied an activity to be explained by a single theory. Valuable insights are gained from theories that focus on individual characteristics and on the socio‐economic context of crime, but these theories are not sufficient explanations of economically motivated crime. They are usefully supplemented by legal responsiveness theory, which focuses on the capacity of the economic system to provide legal means to adapt to economic change. This theory acknowledges the insights of chaos and cellular automata theory into the inevitable and unpredictable nature of economic change. Variation in the system's capacity for legal responsiveness to unpredicted change is hypothesized to have an impact on crime. Economic crime can be an indication of dysfunction in the adaptation systems of the economy. The concepts of ecological and evolutionary economics such as stability, resilience, connectedness and adaptation offer an approach to analyzing the systemic property of legal responsiveness.

Citation

Hoffman, J. (2003), "Legal responsiveness: a contribution to a structural theory of economic crime", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 30 No. 3, pp. 255-274. https://doi.org/10.1108/03068290310460152