RT Article
T1 Corporate Essence and Identity in Criminal Law
JF Journal of business ethics
VO 154
IS 4
SP 955
OP 966
A1 Diamantis, Mihailis E.
LA English
PB Springer Science + Business Media B. V
YR 2019
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1785667696
AB How can we know whether we are punishing the same corporation that committed some past crime? Though central to corporate criminal justice, legal theorists and philosophers have yet to address the basic question of how corporate identity persists through time. Simple cases, where crime and punishment are close in time and the corporation has changed little, can mislead us into thinking an answer is always easy to come by. The issue becomes more complicated when corporate criminals undergo any number of transformations—rebranding, spinning-off a division, merging, changing ownership, changing management, swapping lines of business, etc. These changes are common among all corporations, including those trying to conceal or limit liability for past crimes. This article takes a first step toward developing a workable and philosophically satisfying theory of corporate personal identity and discusses its prospects for fulfilling the retributive, rehabilitative, and deterrent purposes of criminal law.
K1 Successor liability
K1 corporate crime
K1 Personal Identity
DO 10.1007/s10551-018-3892-4