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Lobster Poaching and the Ironies of Law Enforcement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

John L. McMullan  and
David C. Perrier
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Abstract

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This article studies law in action as it relates to organized lobster poaching in Canada. It examines the distinct pattern of relationships that constitutes poaching as a business enterprise and analyzes how “living law” operates as an ironic facilitative form for that which it tries to control. We argue that business poachers evade, avoid, and neutralize fishery laws and regulations by creatively using and manipulating the legal boundaries and organizational resources at their disposal. In effect, the law is an enabling structure for blue water illegality. We analyze business poaching activities as a type of workplace crime, and we account for regulatory failure in the lobster fishery.

Type
Of General Interest
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , 2002 , pp. 679 - 717
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

This article was presented at the meetings of the Law and Society Association and the Research Committee on Sociology of Law, July 3–8, 2001, Budapest, Hungary. The authors wish to acknowledge the Atlantic Institute of Criminology for its financial support in conducting this research and the editor and the anonymous reviewers of the Law & Society Review for their helpful comments.

References

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