White Collar Crime

From the archives

While I’m away on travel, I’m sharing posts from the Sidebars archive.

For almost ten years now I’ve been writing this blog that focuses on white collar crime. I’ve been teaching a class with that name for more than twenty years. But where does that term come from, and what exactly does it mean?

White collar is firmly established as a distinct category of criminal law. Defense attorneys announce in their law firm bios that they practice not just criminal defense, but white collar defense. Prosecutor’s offices have white collar crime sections staffed by attorneys who focus on these cases. The FBI has squads of agents who specialize in white collar investigations. Even popular culture recognizes white collar crime as a distinct area of law--recognizable enough, for example, that the USA Network featured a successful TV drama series called “White Collar.”

Yet if you search the United States criminal code for the section titled, “White Collar Crimes,” you will come up empty. You won’t find a definition of white collar crime spelled out anywhere in the statute books either. The criminal statutes themselves don’t use the term, even those that are understood to fall into the white collar category.

One of the first articles I wrote for Sidebars discussed the origins and meaning of the term, “white collar crime.” So here’s an oldie but still goodie from nearly ten years ago: