There are an excellent leader and survey article in The Economist this week dealing with the criminalization of American business. From the leader:
Who runs the world’s most lucrative shakedown operation? The Sicilian mafia? The People’s Liberation Army in China? The kleptocracy in the Kremlin? If you are a big business, all these are less grasping than America’s regulatory system. The formula is simple: find a large company that may (or may not) have done something wrong; threaten its managers with commercial ruin, preferably with criminal charges; force them to use their shareholders’ money to pay an enormous fine to drop the charges in a secret settlement (so nobody can check the details). Then repeat with another large company. ...
... The public never finds out the full facts of the case, nor discovers which specific people—with souls and bodies—were to blame. Since the cases never go to court, precedent is not established, so it is unclear what exactly is illegal. That enables future shakedowns, but hurts the rule of law and imposes enormous costs. Nor is it clear how the regulatory booty is being carved up. Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, who is up for re-election, reportedly intervened to increase the state coffers’ share of BNP’s settlement by $1 billion, threatening to wield his powers to withdraw the French bank’s licence to operate on Wall Street. Why a state government should get any share at all of a French firm’s fine for defying the federal government’s foreign policy is not clear. ...
... When America was founded, there were only three specified federal crimes—treason, counterfeiting and piracy. Now there are too many to count. In the most recent estimate, in the early 1990s, a law professor reckoned there were perhaps 300,000 regulatory statutes carrying criminal penalties—a number that can only have grown since then. For financial firms especially, there are now so many laws, and they are so complex (witness the thousands of pages of new rules resulting from the Dodd-Frank reforms), that enforcing them is becoming discretionary.
This undermines the predictability and clarity that serve as the foundations for the rule of law, and risks the prospect of a selective—and potentially corrupt—system of justice in which everybody is guilty of something and punishment is determined by political deals . America can hardly tut-tut at the way China’s justice system applies the law to companies in such an arbitrary manner when at times it seems almost as bad itself.
The article goes on to offer an excellent analysis of the issue of corporate versus individual liability, which I highly commend to your attention.
In the meanwhile, it strikes me that this analysis is apt to the discussion I've been having about Leo Strine's new law review article. You will recall (I trust) that Leo Strine and Nicholas Walter's new article, Conservative Collision Course?: The Tension between Conservative Corporate Law Theory and Citizens United (August 1, 2014), available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2481061, argues that:
Because Citizens United unleashes corporate wealth to influence who gets elected to regulate corporate conduct and because conservative corporate theory holds that such spending may only be motivated by a desire to increase corporate profits, the result is that corporations are likely to engage in political spending solely to elect or defeat candidates who favor industry-friendly regulatory policies, even though human investors have far broader concerns, including a desire to be protected from externalities generated by corporate profit-seeking. Citizens United thus undercuts conservative corporate theory’s reliance upon regulation as an answer to corporate externality risk, and strengthens the argument of its rival theory that corporate managers must consider the best interests of employees, consumers, communities, the environment, and society — and not just stockholders — when making business decisions.
In an initial post, I suggested that:
... it seems entirely plausible that corporate political spending does not erode labor and environmental protections but simply slows the rate at which new regulations are piled onto the mountain of laws to which corporations are already subject. Indeed, maybe such expenditures provide a pro-social service by creating incentives for regulators to take the costs of their rules into account.
In other words, corporate political spending may be purely defensive, as a response to the over-criminalization of business. If so, it seems to me that Strine and Walker's argument is significantly weaker. Their argument depends on corporate political spending being offensive rather than defensive (I think).
BTW, I have decided to write that article entitled "Corporate Social Responsibility in the Night Watchman State" as a response to Strine and Walker. So no swiping my title!
