NACDL

Corporate Criminal Liability

This symposium issue on corporate criminal liability, in Volume 41 of the Stetson Law Review, comes from a discussion group at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS). Each participant, which included criminal law and corporate scholars, as well as practitioners, was invited to submit papers related to the topic of corporate criminal liability. The following review focuses on articles from this symposium that are particularly useful for criminal defense practitioners.

Professor Lucian Dervan, in his article Re-evaluating Corporate Criminal Liability: The DOJ’s Internal Moral-Culpability Standard for Corporate Criminal Liability (p. 7), provides an in-depth analysis of the existing DOJ principles on the prosecution of corporations. He offers a third prong to the respondeat superior test, one premised upon moral culpability. He states that “[s]uch a revised standard increases the burden on the prosecution to establish a criminal violatio