The Business Papers Rule: Personal Privacy and White Collar Crime

The first step in this endeavor will be the development of a definition of white collar crime which adequately accounts for the difficulty in combatting it. The next step will be to examine individually the two competing goals law enforcement and privacy - to try to get a sense of the requirements of each. This will lead into a discussion of the conflict between the goals. The article will then move on to consider several unsatisfactory resolutions of the conflict, making that the basis for sketching out the necessary specifications of a good solution. Finally, the business papers rule will be proposed and analyzed, for the purpose not only of responding to the problems raised in the first part of the article, but also of describing an analytical approach to white collar crime enforcement policies. The article will conclude with a discussion of the stability of this suggested approach to white collar crime