Reconstituting the Legal Subject: Comparing and Contrasting Corporate Criminal Liability in Canada and Finland

• In Event: Punishing Corporate Crime

Abstract

In recent decades several Western democratic states have introduced laws aimed at holding corporations and corporate executives criminally liable for their wrongful acts. While there is an important literature examining these legal regimes, there has been little comparative work that interrogates processes of law-making, the political struggles leading to the enactment of corporate criminal liability (CCL) legislation. This paper aims to address this gap by comparing and contrasting the development of CCL in Canada and Finland. Both countries share similar histories as social-democratic welfare states with strong mixed economies that recently engaged long and circuitous routes to criminalizing corporate wrongdoing. Scrutinizing the law reform processes in each jurisdiction, including legislative documents, committee hearings and written opinions, the paper documents how CCL emerged under different conjuctures in each country, yet were similarly shaped by hegemonic beliefs in the non-criminal status of corporations, the importance of private enterprise and established jurisprudence. Of particular note are the ways in which dominant notions of legal individualism and the universal legal subject (i.e. rule of law and mens rea) constrained legislative efforts to hold corporations and corporate actors criminally to account, therein preventing corporate misconduct from being processed as ‘real’ crimes.

Authors

• Anne Alvesalo-Kussi, University of Turku, Finland

• Steven Bittle, University of Ottawa

• Liisa Lähteenmäki, Finnish Institute of Occupational Health