Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 5 of 5
Full-Text Articles in Law
Criminally Bad Management, Samuel W. Buell
Criminally Bad Management, Samuel W. Buell
Faculty Scholarship
Because of their leverage over employees, corporate managers are prime targets for incentives to control corporate crime, even when managers do not themselves commit crimes. Moreover, the collective actions of corporate management — producing what is sometimes referred to as corporate culture — can be the cause of corporate crime, not just a locus of the failure to control it. Because civil liability and private compensation arrangements have limited effects on management behavior — and because the problem is, after all, crime — criminal law is often expected to intervene. This handbook chapter offers a functional explanation for corporate criminal …
The Responsibility Gap In Corporate Crime, Samuel W. Buell
The Responsibility Gap In Corporate Crime, Samuel W. Buell
Faculty Scholarship
In many cases of criminality within large corporations, senior management does not commit the operative offense — or conspire or assist in it — but nonetheless bears serious responsibility for the crime. That responsibility can derive from, among other things, management’s role in cultivating corporate culture, in failing to police effectively within the firm, and in accepting lavish compensation for taking the firm’s reins. Criminal law does not include any doctrinal means for transposing that form of responsibility into punishment. Arguments for expanding doctrine — including broadening of the presently narrow “responsible corporate officer” doctrine — so as to authorize …
Culpability And Modern Crime, Samuel W. Buell
Culpability And Modern Crime, Samuel W. Buell
Faculty Scholarship
Criminal law has developed to prohibit new forms of intrusion on the autonomy and mental processes of others. Examples include modern understandings of fraud, extortion, and bribery, which pivot on the concepts of deception, coercion, and improper influence. Sometimes core offenses develop to include similar concepts, such as when reforms in the law of sexual assault make consent almost exclusively material. Many of these projects are laudable. But progressive programs in substantive criminal law can raise difficult problems of culpability. Modern iterations of criminal offenses often draw lines using concepts involving relative mental states among persons whose conduct is embedded …
Liability And Admission Of Wrongdoing In Public Enforcement Of Law, Samuel W. Buell
Liability And Admission Of Wrongdoing In Public Enforcement Of Law, Samuel W. Buell
Faculty Scholarship
Some judges and scholars have questioned the social value of the standard form in which the Securities and Exchange Commission settles its corporate enforcement actions, including the agency’s use of essentially unreviewed consent decrees that include no admission of liability or wrongdoing. This essay for a symposium on SEC enforcement provides an analysis of the deterrent effects of the three main components of settlements in public enforcement of law: liability, admission, and remedy. The conclusions are the following. All three components have beneficial deterrent effects. Cost considerations nonetheless justify some settlements that dispense with liability or admission, or even both. …
Criminal Abortion Revisited, Samuel W. Buell
Criminal Abortion Revisited, Samuel W. Buell
Faculty Scholarship
This note focuses on the issue of the state's application of the criminal law as a sanction against women who choose to have abortions. History reveals that pre-Roe criminal-abortion law-both by its terms and in its application-expressed an incoherent attitude toward the culpability of these women. While criminal-abortion laws treated the abortionist as a serious felon, sending him to prison for up to twenty years,' the same statutes either did not cover the woman seeking an abortion, or, if the statutes did deem her a criminal, prosecutors and courts refused or neglected to hold her liable criminally. The law instead …