Developments in Corporate Criminal Liability (From Theory to Practice)

Today, many economic and social interactions are done through legal persons and corporations. Considering the development of business and the complexities of technology and industry, their position and role in present world, make their omission or ignoring practically impossible. Accordingly, in many systems, legal persons, like natural persons, have full capacity for legal acts. However, acceptances of such capacity do not require the admission of their criminal liability. Historical developments show that special features difficulties of criminal law prevent the rapid, early or unconditional acceptance of such responsibility. On one hand, expansion of the companies’ activities, emersion of crimes consequent upon industry, environmental crimes, white collar crimes, organized crimes (especially international ones) and… demand the necessity of identification of their criminal liability, and on the other hand, the principles of criminal law are considered as obstructive elements in this regard. The subject of this article is the examination of evolution of legal systems approach, which s an introduction to theoretical arguments in the field of the reasons of each one of them in the next article.