This edited collection sheds light on the evolution of corporate financial crime, exploring a myriad of offenses ranging from money laundering and fraud to market manipulation and bribery. Considering and assessing the models used in national law to determine the culpability of corporations, this book compares the different schemes used to address financial and other organisational crimes committed by these entities. Through a combination of history, law, and global perspectives, its chapters dissect landmark cases and provide detailed analyses of money laundering, fraud, market manipulation, manslaughter, and legislative responses in various locations around the world. This comparative approach offers a unique lens, exploring diverse jurisdictions and shedding light on global patterns of corporate wrongdoing. By critically assessing the challenges of prosecuting economic crimes on a large scale, the collection proposes innovative solutions, including the introduction of ‘failure to prevent’ offences. Corporate Criminal Liability and Sanctions: Current Trends and Policy Changes is a valuable resource for academics, professionals, and anyone intrigued by the ever-evolving realm of white-collar and corporate wrongdoing. It will appeal to scholars across the fields of law, criminology, sociology, and economics, as well as those professionally engaged in preventing and investigating corruption and in developing or enforcing regulation, such as solicitors, barristers, businessmen, and public servants.

With industrialization and globalization, corporations acquired the capacity to influence social life for good or for ill. Yet, corporations are not traditional objects of criminal law. Justified by notions of personal moral guilt, criminal norms have been judged inapplicable to fictional persons, who ‘think’ and ‘act’ through human beings. The expansion of new corporate criminal liability (CCL) laws since the mid-1990s challenges this assumption. Our volume surveys current practice on CCL in 15 civil and common law jurisdictions, exploring the legal conditions for liability, the principles and options for sanctioning, and the procedures for investigating, charging and trying corporate offenders. It considers whether municipal CCL laws are converging around the notion of ‘corporate culture’, and, in any case, the implications of CCL for those charged with keeping corporations, and other legal entities, out of trouble.

The book instructs corporate counsel on how to adopt forward-looking compliance policies that can prevent criminal liability and how to mitigate the severity of penalties when they are unavoidable.

Corporate Criminal Liability is on the rise worldwide: More and more legal systems now include genuinely criminal sanctioning for legal entities. The various regulatory options available to national criminal justice systems, their implications and their constitutional, economic and psychological parameters are key questions addressed in this volume. Specific emphasis is put on procedural questions relating to corporate criminal liability, on alternative sanctions such as blacklisting of corporations, on common corporate crimes and on questions of transnational criminal justice.

Explaining why accountability for corporate crime is rarely imposed under the present law, this text proposes solutions that would help to extend responsibility to a wide range of actors. It develops an Accountability Model under which the courts and corporations work together to achieve accountability across a broad front.

When corporations carry on their business in a grossly negligent manner, or take a cavalier approach to risk management, the consequences can be catastrophic. The harm may be financial, as occurred when such well-regarded companies as Enron, Lehman Brothers, Worldcom and Barings collapsed, or it may be environmental, as illustrated most recently by the Gulf oil spill. Sometimes deaths and serious injuries on a mass scale occur, as in the Bhopal gas disaster, the Chernobyl nuclear explosion, the Paris crash of the Concorde, the capsize of the Herald of Free Enterprise, and rail crashes at Southall, Paddington and Hatfield in England.What role can the law play in preventing such debacles and in punishing the corporate offenders? This collection of thematic papers and European country reports addresses these questions at both a theoretical and empirical level. The thematic papers analyse corporate criminal liability from a range of academic disciplines, including law, sociology/criminology, economics, philosophy and environmental studies, whilst the country reports look at the laws of corporate crime throughout Europe, highlighting both common features and irreconcilable differences between the various jurisdictions.

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.

This provides not only a summary of the criminal prosecution of environmental law in the various countries, but also addresses differences and similarities in practice with respect to environmental criminal law. A critical analysis of the answers is also provided."--Jacket.

Jeremy Bentham and Gary Becker established the tradition of analyzing criminal law in utilitarian and economic terms. This seminal book continues that tradition with specially commissioned, original papers that span the philosophical foundations of the use of economics in criminal law, both traditional economic perspectives and behavioral and experimental approaches to the discipline. The contributors examine and evaluate the optimal design of criminal law norms as well as the ideal structure of law enforcement institutions. They delineate what wrongs ought to be criminalized, identify the boundaries between criminal law and tort, and determine the optimal size of sanctions given the differential vulnerability of victims. They also analyze the special considerations that apply to the regulation of corporate crime, the effects of technology on crime, and the effects of the distribution of wealth on sentencing. This essential Handbook provides students and scholars of criminal law and law and economics the opportunity to explore the diversity of contemporary approaches to the economics of crime. Criminologists, sociologists and policymakers will also find it a valuable addition to their collections.