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Faure, Michael G.; Visser, Marjolein --- "Law and economics of environmental crime" [2004] ELECD 86; in Sjögren, Hans; Skogh, Göran (eds), "New Perspectives on Economic Crime" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2004)

Book Title: New Perspectives on Economic Crime

Editor(s): Sjögren, Hans; Skogh, Göran

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781843766452

Section: Chapter 5

Section Title: Law and economics of environmental crime

Author(s): Faure, Michael G.; Visser, Marjolein

Number of pages: 19

Extract:

5. Law and economics of environmental
crime
Michael G. Faure and Marjolein Visser

INTRODUCTION

In the economic analysis of law, much attention has been paid to the
instruments to be used for the control of environmental pollution. However,
lawyers seem to focus mainly on environmental standards (emission standards
and quality standards) and on the question of how these standards should be
set, whereas economists (mostly interested in environmental economics)
focus mainly on `economic instruments' (emission trading and taxes).
Environmental law is often categorized as administrative law for an integrated
approach (Faure and Skogh, 2003). However, in practice the whole body of
environmental law is, to a large extent, also criminal law. The usual way in
which environmental law is structured consists of the imposition on industry
of specific administrative requirements, specifying the permissible amounts
and quality of polluting emissions, and the punishment, as environmental
crimes, of violations of these requirements. In legal literature, much attention
has been paid to the way in which the law should use penal sanctions to deter
environmental pollution, but environmental criminal law has not, so far, been
very often subjected to an economic analysis.
The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of the way in which
traditional theories on the economics of crime have been applied to
environmental criminal law. We will therefore begin by addressing the
question of why, according to the economist literature, criminal law should be
used at all to deter environmental pollution. An inevitable question in that
respect, ...