ABSTRACT

This chapter outlines the special characteristics of economic regulatory legislation relevant to the use of the criminal sanction, to indicate what implications they have for effective use of the criminal law. It suggests relevant concerns in the use of this sanction beyond the goal of enforcing the specific regulatory norm. The kind of economic regulations whose enforcement through the criminal sanction is the subject of this inquiry may be briefly stated: those which impose restrictions upon the conduct of business as part of a considered economic policy. The chapter deals with the relevance of these characteristics in terms of three major problems: the problem of defining the proscribed conduct, the problem of corporate criminality and the problem of moral neutrality. Fixing criminal liability upon the immediate actors within a corporate structure generally poses no special problem. But the immediate actors may be lower echelon officials or employees who are the tools rather than the responsible originators of the violative conduct.