This book explains why it is important to identify legally accepted corruption and provides a series of examples of corruption using this perspective. It argues that political corruption is the exclusion of those who are affected by a particular policy and that democratic inclusion and engagement are central to public integrity.

Chapter 1: Introduction: What’s Corrupt?, Frank Anechiarico Chapter 2: Doubling Down on Derivatives: The Legal but Corrupt Exploitation of the Fallout from the Great Recession, Danny L. Balfour and Guy B. Adams Chapter 3: Shaping the State to Private Purposes: A Comparison of Conflicts of Interest in the United States and Sweden, Staffan Andersson and Frank Anechiarico Chapter 4: Whose Corruption? Which Law? Law’s Authority and Social Power, Ciarán O'Kelly Chapter 5: Racialized Policing in New York City: The NYPD and Stop, Question, Frisk, Frank Anechiarico Chapter 6: Benefit Corporations: A Solution to the Crisis of Corporate Legitimacy?, Lydia Segal Chapter 7: Inclusion, Accountability and the Reform of Legal Corruption, Frank Anechiarico Appendix A: The Politics of the Swedish Nursing Home Scandal Appendix B: Benchmark Analysis from the Rand Study Appendix C: Conceptual Inventory About the Contributors

Legal but Corrupt is a powerful exploration of political corruption on a variety of fronts, and how a range of official behavior, hostile to most reasonable standards of public ethics and damaging to governance, has become normed, accepted, and indeed defended by law and procedure. . . . This collection includes a good range of highly divergent policy and practice environments; this helps to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts, even though the underlying theme is clear. Anechiarico’s book shines needed light on areas where public trust has been eroded, and makes a strong case for acting to regain that trust.