ABSTRACT
This chapter, Chapter 2, explores the history of whistleblowing in the United States, the legal protections enacted for whistleblowers, and the whistleblowers who helped bring that legislation about. The chapter first reviews definitions for whistleblowing, wrongdoing, and retaliation, beginning with the broad views of researchers about those topics. It illustrates the foundation for those views in federal law and policy designed to protect whistleblowers; it covers the events, such as Watergate, that drove those policies; and it presents the whistleblowers themselves and what they did that influenced law and policy. Finally, it reviews the two major laws affecting corporate whistleblowers (the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010) and examines their successes and failures with regard to whistleblowing. At all times, the chapter offers the federal and corporate perspectives on whistleblowing and whistleblowers that have shaped the current whistleblowing environment.
