Introduction

Comparative socio-legal and criminological research is notoriously complex and fraught with difficulties (Harrendorf, 2011; Huisman et al, 2015). This is particularly true of research that relies on official statistics to study comparative trends in crime and punishment. Official statistics are shaped not only by international developments but also by a variety of local factors, including policing, prosecutorial and recording practices, which can vary by jurisdiction. The task is even more challenging in the case of cross-national research involving countries with non-shared (and non-English) languages. Comparative European white-collar crime research is especially difficult due to the variety of languages, cultures and legal systems that exist within the continent. Consequently, comparative researchers cannot always be sure that they are comparing like with like, though attempts have been made to produce standardized cross-national data, including the European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics (Aebi et al, 2014/2017). Notwithstanding these difficulties, the fields of comparative socio-legal and criminological research are valuable and thriving disciplines which have the potential to make important contributions to theory and practice. Comparative methodologies biases and preconceptions and test the seeming universalism of legal claims and theories in new social, political and economic contexts. Such methods can also highlight global challenges and identify opportunities for collective action to address them. Additionally, comparative research can provide the basis for law reform by illuminating examples of international best practice.

Comparative white-collar crime research is in its early stages, though a number of valuable international collections have emerged to provide an overview of knowledge across different jurisdictions (for example, Pontell and Geis, 2007; van Erp et al, 2015; Van Slyke et al, 2016). This chapter seeks to add to this field of study by comparing responses to white-collar crime in the United States and Ireland. These jurisdictions were chosen as comparators for several reasons. On the one hand, their similarities allow for meaningful comparison. The two countries have a shared history as former British colonies, are English-speaking and operate according to common law systems. They are also both stable Western democracies with neoliberal political economies (see Cavadino and Dignan, 2006). On the other hand, the countries are sufficiently unalike to facilitate interesting explorations of their differences.