Law Commons^™

“Because That's Where The Money Is”: A Theory Of Corporate Legal Compliance, William C. Bradford

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

The study and regulation of firms per se as agents of compliance may be misguided. Firms are abstractions that exist only in the legal, and not the natural, sense, and, as such, utterly lack decisional capacity. Firms do not decide whether to comply with law; people, specifically officers who exercise decisional authority on their behalf, do. Any theory that would explain or predict firm compliance must account for the individual level of analysis. However, most corporate legal compliance research minimizes the salience of personality. Accordingly, Part II traces associations between personalities of CEOs and firm compliance with obligations arising under …