Organised Crime and the Law: A Comparative Analysis

This book presents an overview of the laws and policies adopted to address the phenomenon of organised crime in the UK and Ireland, assessing the degree to which these justice systems have been recalibrated in terms of the prevention, investigation, prosecution, and punishment of organised crime. While the notion of organised crime itself is a contested one, States' legal responses treat it and its constituent offenses as unproblematic in a definitional sense. The book advances a systematic doctrinal critique of those domestic criminal laws, the laws of evidence, and financial regulations. Organised Crime and the Law constructs a theoretical framework on which an appraisal of these legal measures may be based, focusing in particular on the tension between due process and crime control, the demands of public protection and risk aversion, and other adaptations. In particular, it identifies parallels and points of divergence between the different jurisdictions in the UK and Ireland, bearing in mind the shared history of subversive threats and anti-terrorist policies. The book further examines the extent to which policy transfer is evident in the UK and Ireland in terms of emulating the US in the reactions to organised crime.