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Full-Text Articles in Law

Declining Corporate Prosecutions, Brandon L. Garrett Jan 2020

Declining Corporate Prosecutions, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, people across the United States protested that "too big to jail" banks were not held accountable after the financial crisis. Little has changed. Newly collected data concerning enforcement during the Trump Administration has made it possible to assess what impact a se­ries of new policies has had on corporate enforcement. To provide a snapshot comparison, in its last twenty months, the Obama Administration levied $I4.15 billion in total corporate penalties by prosecuting seventy-one financial institu­tions and thirty-four public companies. During the first twenty months of the Trump Administration, corporate penalties declined to …


The Law Of Corporate Investigations And The Global Expansion Of Corporate Criminal Enforcement, Jennifer Arlen, Samuel W. Buell Jan 2020

The Law Of Corporate Investigations And The Global Expansion Of Corporate Criminal Enforcement, Jennifer Arlen, Samuel W. Buell

Faculty Scholarship

The United States model of corporate crime control, developed over the last two decades, couples a broad rule of corporate criminal liability with a practice of reducing sanctions, and often withholding conviction, for firms that assist enforcement authorities by detecting, reporting, and helping prove criminal violations. This model, while subject to skepticism and critiques, has attracted interest among reformers in overseas nations that have sought to increase the frequency and size of their enforcement actions. In both the U.S. and abroad, insufficient attention has been paid to how laws controlling the conduct of corporate investigations are critical to regimes of …


Why Do Prosecutors Say Anything? The Case Of Corporate Crime, Samuel W. Buell Jan 2018

Why Do Prosecutors Say Anything? The Case Of Corporate Crime, Samuel W. Buell

Faculty Scholarship

Criminal procedure law does not require prosecutors to speak outside of court. Professional regulations and norms discourage and sometimes prohibit prosecutors from doing so. Litigation often rewards strategic and tactical maintenance of the element of surprise. Institutional incentives encourage bureaucrats, especially those not bound by procedural requirements of administrative law, to decline to commit themselves to future action. In the always exceptional field of corporate crime, however, the Department of Justice and federal line prosecutors have developed practices of signaling and describing their exercise of discretion through detailed press releases, case filings, and policy documents. This contribution to a symposium …


The Responsibility Gap In Corporate Crime, Samuel W. Buell Jan 2017

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 …


The Corporate Criminal As Scapegoat, Brandon L. Garrett Jan 2015

The Corporate Criminal As Scapegoat, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

A corporation is no scapegoat, assures the Department of Justice, because the first priority is to prosecute culpable individuals and not artificial entities. Yet, as I document in this empirical study, far more often than not, when the largest corporations settle federal criminal cases, no individuals are charged. High profile failures to prosecute executives in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis have only made the problem more urgent. The corporation appears to be a kind of a scapegoat: impossible to physically jail, but capable of receiving blame and punishment while individual culprits go free. In this Article, I develop …


All Judicial Politics Are Local: The Political Trajectory Of Judicial Reform In Haiti, Louis-Alexandre Berg Oct 2013

All Judicial Politics Are Local: The Political Trajectory Of Judicial Reform In Haiti, Louis-Alexandre Berg

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

No abstract provided.


Mission Creep In National Security Law, Fletcher N. Baldwin Jr., Daniel Ryan Kosloskey Jan 2012

Mission Creep In National Security Law, Fletcher N. Baldwin Jr., Daniel Ryan Kosloskey

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.


Somebody's Watching Me: Fcpa Monitorships And How They Can Work Better, F. Joseph Warin, Michael S. Diamant, Veronica S. Root Jan 2011

Somebody's Watching Me: Fcpa Monitorships And How They Can Work Better, F. Joseph Warin, Michael S. Diamant, Veronica S. Root

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores the rise of the corporate compliance monitor as a condition for settling violations of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (“FCPA”) — a setting in which federal prosecutors routinely impose monitors. If U.S. enforcement authorities maintain their current approach, the reality is that companies facing liability for violating the FCPA are likely to have a monitor imposed on them as part of a settlement agreement. From the U.S. government’s perspective, monitorships make sense for companies that violate anti-bribery laws, making it important for offending corporations to learn how to deal with monitors. Pulling from the authors’ extensive …


Globalized Corporate Prosecutions, Brandon L. Garrett Jan 2011

Globalized Corporate Prosecutions, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

In the past, domestic prosecutions of foreign corporations were not noteworthy. Federal prosecutors now advertise a muscular approach targeting major foreign firms and even entire industries. High-profile prosecutions of foreign firms have shaken the international business community. Not only is the approach federal prosecutors have taken novel, but corporate criminal liability is itself a form of American Exceptionalism, and few other countries hold corporations broadly criminally accountable. To study U.S. prosecutions of foreign firms, I assembled a database of publicly reported corporate guilty plea agreements from the past decade. I analyzed U.S. Sentencing Commission data archives on federal corporate prosecutions …


Structural Reform Prosecution, Brandon L. Garrett Jan 2007

Structural Reform Prosecution, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

In what I call a structural reform prosecution, prosecutors secure the cooperation of an organization in adopting internal reforms. No scholars have considered the problem of prosecutors seeking structural reform remedies, perhaps because until recently organizational prosecutions were themselves infrequent. In the past few years, however, federal prosecutors adopted a bold new prosecutorial strategy under which dozens of leading corporations entered into demanding settlements, including AIG, American Online, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., Computer Associates, HealthSouth, KPMG, MCI, Merrill Lynch & Co, Monsanto, and Time Warner. To situate the DOJ's latest strategy, I frame alternatives to the pursuit of structural reform remedies …


The Impact On Director And Officer Behavior: Reflective Essays, Donald C. Langevoort Jan 2007

The Impact On Director And Officer Behavior: Reflective Essays, Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I fall on the side of the skeptics about whether criminal liability in financial reporting cases is a healthy tool because I have doubts about whether judgments are likely to be proportionate. And proportionality is a very important measure in criminal law for two reasons. First, we expect the punishment to fit the crime as a matter of justice. Secondly, if we have disproportionately harsh treatment, then the behavior of officers and directors in response to over-deterrence is that they will pay too much attention to matters that are precautionary as opposed to profit-generating. And the point of a business …


Technological Evolution And The Devolution Of Corporate Financial Reporting, Donald C. Langevoort Jan 2004

Technological Evolution And The Devolution Of Corporate Financial Reporting, Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

My claim is that the technology link to the recent disclosure scandals is no coincidence. To be sure, cheating tempts all who seek wealth, in whatever line of business they find themselves. I want to show, however, how the rapid pace of innovation at a number of levels offered motive, opportunity, and rationalization for a downshift in financial reporting norms, which in turn made outright fraud more probable.


The Organizational Psychology Of Hyper-Competition: Corporate Irresponsibility And The Lessons Of Enron, Donald C. Langevoort Jan 2002

The Organizational Psychology Of Hyper-Competition: Corporate Irresponsibility And The Lessons Of Enron, Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

What I want to do here is first explain my fears and then explore the Enron story from the standpoint of both social psychology and organizational behavior. My sense going in, at least, is that the social forces and selfish norms that emerge fairly naturally in highly competitive settings such as these dominate as behavioral influences over anything but high-powered legal controls. The kind of firm that I want to concentrate on is the "new economy" sort that requires a high rate of creative productivity from a large number of key managers and employees. Thus, I will put to the …


The Negligent Commercial Transaction Tort: Imposing Common Law Liability On Merchants For Sales And Leases To “Defective” Customers, Robert M. Howard Sep 1988

The Negligent Commercial Transaction Tort: Imposing Common Law Liability On Merchants For Sales And Leases To “Defective” Customers, Robert M. Howard

Duke Law Journal

No abstract provided.