Towards An Adequate Theory of Corporate Criminal Liability

Abstract

In its contemporary sense, corporate criminal liability, which is the legal responsibility of a corporation for criminal actions, renders the retributive and rehabilitative objectives of punishment meaningless, and provokes a spill-over effect on non-culpable individual members of the corporation. Criminal liability is often imposed on the corporation as a singular collective agent due to the difficulty inherent in accurate attributions of liability to individual members of the corporation. However, this process has resulted into cases where individual members of the corporation ‘hide behind the corporate veil’ to commit criminal acts for which the corporation is punished. Such individuals evade criminal liability and the resulting punishment for their misconduct; and when the corporation is sanctioned, innocent members of the corporation are equally culpable of the corporate crime. Employing the critical and analytical tools of philosophy, the essay adopts Matt Peterson and Christian Barry’s contributory fault principle as a model for building an effective theoretical justification for corporate criminal liability. This is with a view to ensuring a fair theory of corporate criminal liability which would imbibe the stated objectives of punishment as well as ensure that injustice is not meted out to innocent stakeholders of the corporation.