The Comparative History and Theory of Corporate Criminal Liability

Abstract

This paper is an exercise in comparative legal history and theory. It argues, first, that traditional views of the history of corporate criminal liability in German and Anglo-American law are interestingly mistaken, or at least incomplete, taken independently and comparatively, and, second, that histories and theories of corporate criminal liability engage in symbolic jurisprudence insofar as they treat their subject as a litmus test for other, more fundamental, phenomena, such as the relative influence of Roman and German law or the relative commitment of systems of criminal law to science, truth, and justice.