Between Impunity and Imperialism


Book Description

When people pay bribes to foreign public officials, how should the law respond? This question has been debated ever since the enactment of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, and some of the key arguments can be traced back to Cicero in the last years of the Roman Republic and Edmund Burke in late eighteenth-century England. In recent years, the U.S. and other members of the OECD have joined forces to make anti-bribery law one of the most prominent sources of liability for firms and individuals who operate across borders. The modern regime is premised on the idea that transnational bribery is a serious problem which invariably merits a vigorous legal response. The shape of that response can be summed up in the phrase "every little bit helps," which in practice means that: prohibitions on bribery should capture a broad range of conduct; enforcement should target as broad a range of actors as possible; sanctions should be as stiff as possible; and as many agencies as possible should be involved in the enforcement process. An important challenge to the OECD paradigm, labelled here the "anti-imperialist critique," accepts that transnational bribery is a serious problem but questions the conventional responses. This book uses a series of high-profile cases to illustrate key elements of transnational bribery law in action, and analyzes the law through the lenses of both the OECD paradigm and the anti-imperialist critique. It ultimately defends a distinctively inclusive and experimentalist approach to transnational bribery law.




Corporate Compliance on a Global Scale


Book Description

This edited volume presents an innovative and critical analysis of corporate compliance from an interdisciplinary and international perspective. It defines the historical framework and the various roles played by corporate compliance in today's context. It questions how different cultures affect economic behaviors and under which conditions the individual choices may be directed toward law-abiding behavior. Examining corporate compliance as a tool of criminal and regulatory policy strategies in different countries and sectors, this book also aims to provide a picture of the dimension and scope of the public-private partnership, focusing on the prevention and detection of corporate crimes. It analyzes the effects of corporate compliance on the internal organization in terms of cost-benefit assessment, as well as the opportunities in technical innovation for detecting and controlling risk.




Advanced Introduction to Corporate Compliance


Book Description

Providing a clear overview of compliance programs, David Hess explores not only their key features and how to implement them, but also the public policy issues related to their use in criminal and regulatory law enforcement. Hess uses research on behavioral ethics and organizational behavior to present insights into the implementation of compliance program elements and how to establish an ethical corporate culture.




Evil Corporations


Book Description

This book elaborates and interrogates the idea of evil corporations from a diverse range of disciplines. There has long been awareness of systemic harms inflicted by corporations, but this awareness has rarely led to any effective legal means to prevent and/or respond adequately to them. Lawyers and legal theorists appear to be stuck asking the same questions, and giving the same ineffective answers. Part of the problem, this book maintains, is the relative lack of theoretical interrogation into the nature of corporations as responsible, moral agents. To break this stasis, this book draws upon philosophies of wickedness in order to ask whether or not corporations are, or can be, evil. With contributions from a range of different disciplines, including law, cultural theory, theology, and philosophy, it offers a novel account of how and why corporate wrongs are caused, whilst exploring the extent to which the legal system itself facilitates such wrongdoing. The book targets a broad international audience with research interests in corporate crime. This will be of particular interest to those within the legal discipline, including corporate law, criminal law, corporate crime and law and humanities scholars.




Histories of Transnational Criminal Law


Book Description

This edited collection provides an in-depth account of the history of key developments in transnational criminal law. While the history of international criminal law is now a much written about topic, the origins of most modern transnational criminal laws are not well understood. Histories of Transnational Criminal Law provides for the first time a set of legal histories of state efforts to combat and cooperate against transnational crime. With contributions from a group of word-leading experts, this edited volume traverses a range of topics, beginning with the normative, intellectual, and institutional histories of transnational criminal law. It then moves to the histories of specific transnational crimes ranging across eras from piracy to cybercrime, and finishes by examining jurisdiction, modes of liability, different forms of procedural cooperation, and the predicament of the individual in transnational criminal law. The book highlights specific issues and how they have been resolved, in the loose assemblage of norms, institutions, and practices that constitutes transnational criminal law.




Illusion of Order


Book Description

This is the first book to challenge the broken-windows theory of crime, which argues that permitting minor misdemeanors, such as loitering and vagrancy, to go unpunished only encourages more serious crime. The theory has revolutionized policing in the United States and abroad, with its emphasis on policies that crack down on disorderly conduct and aggressively enforce misdemeanor laws. The problem, argues Bernard Harcourt, is that although the broken-windows theory has been around for nearly thirty years, it has never been empirically verified. Indeed, existing data suggest that it is false. Conceptually, it rests on unexamined categories of law abiders and disorderly people and of order and disorder, which have no intrinsic reality, independent of the techniques of punishment that we implement in our society. How did the new order-maintenance approach to criminal justice--a theory without solid empirical support, a theory that is conceptually flawed and results in aggressive detentions of tens of thousands of our fellow citizens--come to be one of the leading criminal justice theories embraced by progressive reformers, policymakers, and academics throughout the world? This book explores the reasons why. It also presents a new, more thoughtful vision of criminal justice.




Criminal Law


Book Description

This text, the only criminal law casebook authored by two progressive female law professors of color, provides the reader with both critical race and critical feminist theory perspectives on criminal law. The book focuses on the cultural context of substantive criminal law, integrating issues of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation where relevant




Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons


Book Description

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.




Progressive Corporate Law


Book Description

Reflecting recent re-examinations of the nature and purpose of the modern publicly held corporation, Progressive Corporate Law introduces the reader to alternative perspectives within the field. The contributors to this volume are loosely bound both by their rejection of the prevailing paradigm of the corporation as a public good designed exclusively for the maximization of private profit and by their affirmative goal of designing corporate laws that accord better with the corporation's political and social realities. The resulting series of visions emphasizes communitarian themes of efficiency and morality of responsibility, altruism, and unity within the corporate form as well as between the corporation and the broader society. Progressive Corporate Law is important reading for business executives, lawyers, policymakers, and others who are concerned with the role of corporations in modem life. Designed to act as a springboard for stimulating discussion, it will be a valuable supplement to courses and seminars in corporate law and business ethics.




Progressive Prosecution


Book Description

Provides compelling and manageable solutions for how to reform the criminal justice system from the inside out A racial reckoning in the US criminal justice system was long overdue well before the highly publicized murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others in 2020. Progressive Prosecution argues that prosecutors, having helped build our failed system of mass incarceration, must now lead the charge to dismantle it. With contributions from practicing district attorneys as well as leading scholars in the fields of law and criminal justice, Taylor-Thompson and Thompson’s volume offers an unapologetically ambitious vision for reform. The contributors draw from empirical evidence and years of combined research experience to argue that change must happen at the local level, with prosecutors choosing to adopt race-conscious approaches. These prosecutors must do the hard work themselves, actively focusing on the ways that race misshapes perceptions of criminality, influences discretionary calls, affects how we select juries, and induces a reliance on punitive responses. Progressive Prosecution acts as both a call to action and a practical guide, instructing prosecutors on what they need to do to bring about lasting and meaningful change. Progressive Prosecution is an urgent work of scholarship, a must-read for anyone committed to racial equity and meaningful criminal justice reform.