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Buell, Samuel W. --- "Criminally bad management" [2018] ELECD 252; in Arlen, Jennifer (ed), "Research Handbook on Corporate Crime and Financial Misdealing" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018) 59

Book Title: Research Handbook on Corporate Crime and Financial Misdealing

Editor(s): Arlen, Jennifer

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN: 9781783474462

Section: Chapter 3

Section Title: Criminally bad management

Author(s): Buell, Samuel W.

Number of pages: 28

Abstract/Description:

Because of their leverage over employees, corporate managers are prime targets for incentives to control corporate crime, even when managers do not themselves commit crimes. Moreover, the collective actions of corporate management—producing what is sometimes referred to as corporate culture—can be the cause of corporate crime, not just a locus of the failure to control it. Because civil liability and private compensation arrangements have limited effects on management behavior—and because the problem is, after all, crime—criminal law is often expected to intervene. This chapter offers a functional explanation for corporate criminal liability: individual criminal liability cannot effectively address the relationship between senior managers and corporate crime but corporate criminal liability can, at least in part. Thus the practice of corporate criminal liability has grown and will continue to do so, at least in the absence of major restructuring of criminal law.