Corporations and the Limits of Criminal Law

Corporations and the

Limits of Criminal Law

At various times it has seemed that the scope of criminal law and the restrictions on liberty have been excessive. So it was when Sir William Blackstone wrote his Commentaries and urged judges to moderate the capital penalties Parliament had imposed. Similarly today, some have wondered whether too many Americans are caught up in the criminal justice system. Criminal law is simply not the appropriate remedy for every problem, especially for technical offenses committed without a guilty mind.

This colloquium will examine the limits of the criminal law in the context of corporations and their employees. We will examine why criminal laws might be excessive from a public choice perspective. We’ll also look at how constitutional protections might be lost when corporations and their executives are charged with crimes. In addition, we’ll ask how judges should respond when faced with what seems to them as prosecutorial misbehavior.

The Limits of the Criminal Law	Sara Sun Beale	Duke Law
Corporate Criminal Liability	Sara Sun Beale
Economics of Corporate Criminal Law	Alan O. Sykes	Stanford Law
Economics of Corporate Criminal Law II	Alan O. Sykes
Enforcement: Remedies and the Attorney-Client Privilege	Jeffrey Parker	George Mason Law
Where Do We Go From Here?	Jeffrey Parker

Sara Beale is the Lowndes Professor at Duke Law School and the co-author of Federal Criminal Law and Related Actions: Crimes, Forfeiture, the False Claims Act and RICO, Grand Jury Law and Practice, and Federal Criminal Law and Its Enforcement. Alan O. Sykes is the Kowal Professor at Stanford Law School, and a leading expert on the application of economics to legal problems. He is also the associate editor of the Journal of International Economic Law. Jeffrey S. Parker is the former deputy chief counsel to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.