We live in an era defined by corporate greed and malfeasance—one in which unprecedented accounting frauds and failures of compliance run rampant. In order to calm investor fears, revive perceptions of legitimacy in markets, and demonstrate the resolve of state and federal regulators, a host of reforms, high-profile investigations, and symbolic prosecutions have been conducted in response. But are they enough? In this timely work, William S. Laufer argues that even with recent legal reforms, corporate criminal law continues to be ineffective. As evidence, Laufer considers the failure of courts and legislatures to fashion liability rules that fairly attribute blame for organizations. He analyzes the games that corporations play to deflect criminal responsibility. And he also demonstrates how the exchange of cooperation for prosecutorial leniency and amnesty belies true law enforcement. But none of these factors, according to Laufer, trumps the fact that there is no single constituency or interest group that strongly and consistently advocates the importance and priority of corporate criminal liability. In the absence of a new standard of corporate liability, the power of regulators to keep corporate abuses in check will remain insufficient. A necessary corrective to our current climate of graft and greed, Corporate Bodies and Guilty Minds will be essential to policymakers and legal minds alike. “[This] timely work offers a dispassionate analysis of problems relating to corporate crime.”—Harvard Law Review

Private military organizations are a new and important feature of the international landscape. They offer control of potential massive violence to the highest bidder with very limited accountability. This book offers critical insights into both the phenomenon and the challenges of and potential for regulation.

How to induce corporate compliance with regulations? Harsh punishments will cause companies to disguise violations, and mild punishments will cause companies to report their violations and make weak efforts to avoid them. In this book, Sharon Oded canvasses the history of thinking about corporate compliance, and he proposes his own candidate for the best law. This is a sophisticated account of legal incentives that will repay any reader interested in corporate compliance. Robert Cooter, University of California, Berkeley, US The effective control of corporate misconduct is a vital but elusive task for regulators, given the complexity of organization structures and the need to find the right balance between deterrent- and cooperative-based enforcement policies. In this powerful and comprehensive study, Sharon Oded argues for combining different approaches and boldly advocates, in particular, the use of third-party independent corporate monitoring firms to implement self-policing strategies. This will be essential reading for those involved in the theory or practice of regulatory corporate enforcement. Anthony Ogus, University of Manchester, UK and University of Rotterdam, The Netherlands This book considers how a regulatory enforcement policy should be designed to efficiently induce proactive corporate compliance. It first explores two major schools of thought regarding law enforcement, both the deterrence and cooperative approaches, and shows that neither of these represents an optimal regulatory enforcement paradigm from a social welfare perspective. It provides a critical analysis of recent developments in US Federal corporate liability regimes, and proposes a generic framework that better tailors sanction schemes and monitoring systems to regulatee performance. The proposed framework efficiently induces corporate proactive compliance, while maintaining an optimal level of deterrence. This insightful book will appeal to academics in law and economics, behavioral economics, criminology, and business, as well as to practitioners and policymakers.

Exploring legal treatises, court decisions, political illustrations, photographs, and modernist literature, this volume reveals that the ambiguous status of corporate intention in the first half of the twentieth century provoked conflicting theories of meaning and interpretation still debated today.

This collection examines critically, and with an eye to reform, conceptions and conditions of corporate blameworthiness in law. It draws on legal, moral, regulatory and psychological theory, as well as historical and comparative perspectives. These insights are applied across the spheres of civil, criminal, and international law. The collection also has a deliberate focus on the 'nuts and bolts' of the law: the legal, equitable and statutory principles and rules that operate to establish corporate states of mind, on which responsibility as a matter of daily legal practice commonly depends.The collection therefore engages strongly with scholarly debates. The book also speaks, clearly and cogently, to the judges, regulators, legislators, law reform commissioners, barristers and practitioners who administer and, through their respective roles, incrementally influence the development of the law at the coalface of legal practice.

It is now trite knowledge that corporate criminal liability is laced with a large number of contradictions that seriously threaten its legitimacy. This book demonstrates that these contradictions may be avoided if courts consistently refer to an adequate mechanism of imputation. It proposes parameters for evaluating mechanisms of imputation and shows how an adequate mechanism may be determined. This distinctive book provides students and practitioners with an exposition of the current substantive and procedural corporate criminal law and considers other ways of regulating the activities of corporations than using the criminal law. It also addresses the distinction between internal knowledge and external knowledge with reference to pedigreed and non-pedigreed rules and shows how the concept of discursive dilemma may be employed to aggregate the acts and intents of agents for the purposes of imputing these acts and intents to accused corporations and holding them liable. This book is highly recommended for students of criminology, law and business. It should also be of interest to defence counsels, prosecutors and regulatory agencies that either represent and advise corporate defendants or seek to hold corporations accountable for the breach of criminal law standards.

Through a rational reconstruction of orthodox legal principles, and reference to cutting-edge neuro-science, this book reveals some startling truths about the criminal law, its history and the fundamental doctrines that underpin the attribution of criminal fault. While this has important implications for the criminal law generally, the focus of this work is the development of a theory of corporate criminality that accords with modern theory of group agency, itself informed by advancements in contemporary philosophy and social science. The innovation it proposes is the theoretical and practical means by which criminal fault can be attributed directly to the corporate actor, where liability cannot or should not be reduced to its individual members.