Crisis, what crisis? Regulation and the academic orthodoxy

What can criminology or socio-legal studies tell us about the causes of the financial crisis – a failure of regulation, at the very least – or ways in which further such crises might be prevented, mitigated, responded to? The article begins by setting out the emergence and dimensions of the academic orthodoxy on regulation – a series of shared assumptions regarding feasible and desirable forms of regulation. Then it undertakes quantitative and qualitative content analysis of work on regulation and the crisis to assess the extent to which this orthodoxy has been reassessed in the light of events since 2007