Our judgment of whether and to what extent various forms
of conduct are morally wrong is undoubtedly influenced by how
such conduct is treated by the law.44 Indeed, there are, in addition
to the criminalization of ostensibly morally neutral conduct
referred to above, at least four other ways in which legislatures
have contributed to the phenomenon of moral ambiguity in
white collar crime. First, many of the crimes we have been considering
are dealt with in specialized, regulatory portions of state
and federal law rather than in the criminal law proper. For
example, securities fraud is dealt with in the part of the U.S.
Code dealing with securities law, tax evasion in sections dealing
with tax law, criminal price-fixing in the antitrust provisions, and
environmental crimes in the titles dealing with environmental
law. Because such offenses are codified separately from “real
crimes,” they are perhaps less likely to be thought of as real
crimes.