Law Commons^™

Humanizing The Corporation While Dehumanizing The Individual: The Misuse Of Deferred-Prosecution Agreements In The United States, Andrea Amulic

Michigan Law Review

American prosecutors routinely offer deferred-prosecution and nonprosecution agreements to corporate defendants, but not to noncorporate defendants. The drafters of the Speedy Trial Act expressly contemplated such agreements, as originally developed for use in cases involving low-level, nonviolent, noncorporate defendants. This Note posits that the almost exclusive use of deferrals in corporate cases is inconsistent with the goal that these agreements initially sought to serve. The Note further argues that this exclusivity can be attributed to prosecutors’ tendency to only consider collateral consequences in corporate cases and not in noncorporate cases. Ultimately, this Note recommends that prosecutors evaluate collateral fallout when …

Too Vast To Succeed, Miriam H. Baer

Michigan Law Review

If sunlight is, in Justice Brandeis’s words, “the best of disinfectants,” then Brandon Garrett’s latest book, Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations might best be conceptualized as a heroic attempt to apply judicious amounts of Lysol to the murky world of federal corporate prosecutions. “How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations” is the book’s neutral- sounding secondary title, but even casual readers will quickly realize that Garrett means that prosecutors compromise too much with corporations, in part because they fear the collateral consequences of a corporation’s criminal indictment. Through an innovation known as the Deferred Prosecution Agreement, or DPA, …

Toward Greater Guidance: Reforming The Definitions Of The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, Matthew W. Muma

Michigan Law Review

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 is the cornerstone of the United States’ efforts to combat the involvement of U.S. companies and individuals in corruption abroad. Enforced by both the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) and the Department of Justice (“DOJ”), the Act targets companies and individuals that pay bribes to “foreign officials,” a nebulous category of persons that includes everyone from foreign cabinet members to janitors at companies only partially owned by a foreign state. After only sporadic enforcement in the early years of the Act’s existence, the SEC and DOJ now bring many cases annually. This increased …

The Criminal Liability Of Corporations And Other Groups: A Comparative View, L. H. Leigh

Michigan Law Review

Briefly, three positions concerning corporate liability may be identified. First, there are systems of full corporate criminal liability, such as those in England and the United States. Second, there are systems that recognize only partial corporate criminal liability, for example Denmark, Belgium, and France. Finally, some systems do not permit such liability at all, or permit it only under the guise of administrative offenses. Italy and West Germany afford examples of this restrictive view of corporate liability.

This Article will sketch each of these positions in some detail, beginning, in Part I, with those systems that authorize full liability. Part …

Toward Understanding Unlawful Organizational Behavior, Diane Vaughan

Michigan Law Review

The emergence and growth of regulatory agencies charged with controlling organizational misconduct has been so widespread that the monitoring and regulation of corporate interactions has itself become "big business," with the complexity of the regulatory agencies at times matching or even exceeding that of the organizations they regulate. The effectiveness of these efforts to control unlawful organizational behavior has been assessed in many different ways. The records of agency investigations, administrative hearings, and judicial proceedings provide data on enforcement actions, court decrees, trials, convictions, penalties, and other indicators that allow empirical estimates to be made. A realistic assessment of agency …

The Organization As Weapon In White-Collar Crime, Stanton Wheeler, Mitchell Lewis Rothman

Michigan Law Review

This Article explores the advantages of using organization or occupation in the more typical case. Our inquiry takes this as its central question: What difference does it make when a white-collar crime is committed in the course of one's occupation or when acting on behalf, or with the assistance, of an organization? If we are becoming, as some have argued, an organizational society, then we should see the results of this change reflected in illicit as well as licit behavior. The organizational form may be used for either social or antisocial ends. Our principal hypothesis, as the title suggests, is …

Enforced Self-Regulation: A New Strategy For Corporate Crime Control, John Braithwaite

Michigan Law Review

Part I outlines the concept of enforced self-regulation, sketches its theoretical underpinnings, and illustrates its application in the context of corporate accounting standards. Part II argues the merits of enforced self-regulation. Part III dispels notions that the proposal is a radical departure from existing regulatory practice and points to areas in which necessary empirical research could be conducted by discussing incipient manifestations of partial enforced self-regulation models in the aviation, mining, and pharmaceutical industries. Part IV considers in some detail the weaknesses of the proposed model. The final Part considers the importance of determining an optimal mix of regulatory strategies; …

The Sentencing Of White-Collar Criminals In Federal Courts: A Socio-Legal Exploration Of Disparity, Ilene H. Nagel, John L. Hagan

Michigan Law Review

This Article addresses that question by examining judicial sentencing philosophy as applied to white-collar criminality and reporting data that illuminate the operation of that philosophy. Part I of the Article argues that the traditional purposes and limits of criminal sentencing may plausibly justify either disparate or comparable sentences in cases of white-collar and common criminality. Part II describes the obstacles to an accurate empirical inquiry into how judges resolve these uncertainties in the theory of punishment. Part III presents a study designed to overcome as many of these obstacles as possible. What is most dramatic is that the resulting data …

Corporate Crime, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Corporate Crime by Marshall B. Clinard and Peter C. Yeager