Rights statement: © 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.
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Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Corporate Crime and Plea Bargains
AU - Procaccia, U.
AU - Winter, E.
N1 - © 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.
PY - 2017/5
Y1 - 2017/5
N2 - Corporate entities enjoy legal subjectivity in a variety of forms, but they are not human beings. Hence, their legal capacity to bear rights and obligations of their own is not universal. This article lays out a stylized model that explores, from a normative point of view, one of the limits that ought to be set on corporate capacity to act "as if" they had a human nature-the capacity to commit crime. Accepted wisdom states that corporate criminal liability is justified as a measure to deter criminal behavior. Our analysis supports this intuition in one subset of cases, but also reveals that deterrence might in fact be undermined in another subset of cases, especially in an environment saturated with plea bargains involving serious violations of the law. © 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston 2017.
AB - Corporate entities enjoy legal subjectivity in a variety of forms, but they are not human beings. Hence, their legal capacity to bear rights and obligations of their own is not universal. This article lays out a stylized model that explores, from a normative point of view, one of the limits that ought to be set on corporate capacity to act "as if" they had a human nature-the capacity to commit crime. Accepted wisdom states that corporate criminal liability is justified as a measure to deter criminal behavior. Our analysis supports this intuition in one subset of cases, but also reveals that deterrence might in fact be undermined in another subset of cases, especially in an environment saturated with plea bargains involving serious violations of the law. © 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston 2017.
KW - corporate capacity
KW - corporate criminal liability
KW - criminal deterrence
KW - stakeholders
U2 - 10.1515/lehr-2017-0004
DO - 10.1515/lehr-2017-0004
M3 - Journal article
VL - 11
SP - 119
EP - 133
JO - Law and Ethics of Human Rights
JF - Law and Ethics of Human Rights
SN - 1938-2545
IS - 1
ER -