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Corporate Criminal Minds, Mihailis E. Diamantis

Notre Dame Law Review

In order to commit the vast majority of crimes, corporations must, in some sense, have mental states. Lawmakers and scholars assume that factfinders need fundamentally different procedures for attributing mental states to corporations and individuals. As a result, they saddle themselves with unjustifiable theories of mental state attribution, like respondeat superior, that produce results wholly at odds with all the major theories of the objectives of criminal law.

This Article draws on recent findings in cognitive science to develop a new, comprehensive approach to corporate mens rea that would better allow corporate criminal law to fulfill its deterrent, retributive, and …