On Corporate Criminal Liability In Anglo-American Legal System

This Article discusses"legal persons"in an extensive sense. The Article analyzes corporate separately criminal liability in Anglo-American Legal System at three periods.Firstly, the Article explores ancient forms of criminal responsibilities with a conclusion that corporate bodies themselves, rather than natural persons, had always been the main subject of penal laws when the French Revolution broke out. In compliance with modern criminological principles, corporate criminal liabilities, however, are essentially different from ancient collective criminal responsibilities, notwithstanding the historical relationship between them.Chapter Two of the Article provides a clear flowchart concerning the development of corporate criminal liabilities in Anglo-American System, and points out that many special characteristics of the System function as a platform for the admission of corporate criminal liabilities. This Chapter also predicates the coexistence between the Fiction Theory and the vicarious models Anglo-American courts have taken.Chapter Three discusses respectively corporate criminal liabilities in four Anglo-American Countries, i.e. Britain, the Unites States, Australia and Canada. The Article maintains that there is a trend of examining corporate criminal responsibilities by considering a corporate as a social entity which is as real as a natural person. This trend is seen by the Author as a consequence of the influences from the Reality Theory.The final chapter, apart from summarizing the whole article, advocates the approach of studying corporate criminal liabilities under the Reality Theory. The Author wishes to offer some new angles of view for our country.