The Corporate Criminal as Scapegoat

Corporate Criminal Liability

The Common Law: Vicarious Liability and the Development of Primary Liability UNLESS THE TERMS OF THE STATUTE INVOLVED SPECIFICALLY PROVIDE TO the contrary, the criminal responsibility of a company or corporation, as distinct from its officers or employees, falls to be determined by common law principles. Under original common law, a company could not be convicted for any criminal offence. The c...

The Role of Criminal Law in Policing Corporate Misconduct

In the early 1990s, I spent a couple of years as Chief of the Criminal Division in the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. One of my principal responsibilities was to hear “appeals” from defense lawyers, usually, although not exclusively, in white collar crime cases. These lawyers felt that their clients should not be indicted, or that the plea offer they had rece...

Corporate Death Penalty: Corporate Criminal Convictions in the Twenty-first Century

The conventional wisdom states that prosecuting corporations can subject them to terrible collateral consequences that risk putting them out of business and causing massive social and economic harm. According to this viewpoint, which has come to dominate the literature following the demise of Arthur Andersen after that firm’s prosecution in the wake of the Enron scandal, even a criminal indictm...

Limitations of the scapegoat theory of prejudice.

Corporate Criminal Law and Organization Incentives: A Managerial Perspective∗

Corporate criminal liability puts a serious challenge to the economic theory of enforcement. Are corporate crimes different from other crimes? Are these crimes best deterred by punishing individuals, punishing corporations, or both? What is optimal structure of sanctions? Should corporate liability be criminal or civil? This paper has two major contributions to the literature. First, it provide...