Variably Legal Markets Rethinking Markets and Crime

1. Variably Legal Markets: A New Conceptual Perspective
Letizia Paoli and Nicholas Lord

2. Variably Legal Markets: Rationale and Conceptualization
Letizia Paoli and Nicholas Lord

3. Promoting Factors of Variably Legal Markets
Letizia Paoli and Nicholas Lord

4. Arms Exports Controls: From Variabilities in Compliance to Variably Legal Markets
Borja Álvaro Álvarez Martínez

5. Through the Smoke: Regulation, (Il)Legality, and the Complexity Of Cigarette Markets
Francesco Calderoni

6. Commodifying Nature: Environmental Harm and the Legal Ambiguities of Resource Markets
Rob White

7. The Legal-Illegal Market Spectrum of Gambling: Regulation, Crime, and Market Adaptation
Toine Spapens

8. Variably Legal and Irregularly Regulated: Global Markets in Collectable Antiquities, Wildlife, and Fossils
Annette Hübschle, Simon Mackenzie, and Donna Yates

9. Growing Complexity in the Legal Variability of Cannabis Markets
Gary R. Potter and Hattie Wells

10. Reflecting on Variably Legal Markets and Forging a New Programme of Research
Letizia Paoli and Nicholas Lord

Biography

Letizia Paoli is Professor of Criminology and Chair of the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at KU Leuven, and a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on organized crime and related ‘global bads’, law and other rule violations in legal markets, and the harms of crime and policy.

Nicholas Lord is Professor of Criminology at the University of Manchester, UK. His research focuses on exploring empirically and conceptually the organization of serious crimes for gain, in particular ‘white-collar crimes’, ‘organized crimes’, illicit financial flows and money laundering, as well as their market contexts.

"The term "illegal market" conjures up, even for experts such as myself, the image of furtive transactions between buyers and sellers all in fear of the law.  This book shines a new light on illegal markets.  Most of them are imbedded in long chains of transactions that vary in their legality and even more in the threats that participants face from the criminal justice system.  Markets for cocaine and heroin are not the epitome of illegal markets but rather the exceptions; as the authors suggest, most illegal markets are in fact "variably legal markets."

Peter Reuter, Professor, University of Maryland

"There are some tensions between Paoli and Lord’s construct of variably legal markets and the universal reality of variably ‘under-enforced’ markets which apply in almost all criminal settings.  However this important book expounds the framework convincingly in a range of legally contested markets to illuminate phenomena as diverse as cryptocurrencies, tobacco, environmental and cultural artefacts, and sex markets, throwing fresh light on some traditional and some novel criminological subjects."

Michael Levi, Professor, Cardiff University

"A much-needed theoretical and empirical piece to overcome the binary distinctions between criminal and legal markets and to push researchers in the right direction: to start looking at the variability of legality in all markets."

Masarah Paquet-Clouston, Université de Montréal