Writing economic crimes into being: The case of swindling

Economic crimes are – often – abstract crimes. Even for a somewhat well-trained accounting expert, these crimes are ambiguous, hard to detect and difficult to interpret,. The abstract character of economic crimes is a problem in need of a solution. The abstractness needs to be reduced in order to make the court case judicially manageable, i.e. possible to work with during the process of trial and legitimise to the public. In this paper we argue that such a reduction of abstractness is accomplished in the text-work undertaken by the courts, i.e. in their writing of the reasoning behind the verdict. Based upon detailed analyses of court reasonings, and drawing upon linguistic theory, we show how the abstract character of a specific type of economic crime, that of swindling, is turned into illusions of concreteness. These illusions are accomplished by means of a set of rhetorical manoeuvres that reduce the uncertainty of both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the alleged crime. The paper offers a novel perspective on how economic crimes come into being, not only in terms of the misdeed done by individuals and corporations, but also through the textwork undertaken in the court system.