Joseph Vining

Corporate Crime and the Religious Sensibility

Prosecution of corporations, for common law offenses such as homicide as well as for specially tailored statutory offenses, is now an established part of the administration of criminal law in the United States. Conviction is explicitly guided and justified by the retributive purposes of criminal law as much as the deterrent. Evidence of corporate mens rea generally focuses on calculated indifference to value in itself - of the kind contemplated in the theory of profit maximization - and corporate culpability and remorse are operative terms in sentencing. The ontology of a responsible person here, irreducible to human individuals or to a system, may connect this area of criminal law to religious thought in a special way. This area may also be where the retributive, with its recognition of responsibility and its opening to remorse, atonement and forgiveness, is most clearly articulated and justified. Positive duties are implied and creativity looked for in analysis. These developments are more congenial to a religious sensibility than to one that is purely secular. Their broad acceptance may be made possible by the breadth of religious practice in the United States, and be evidence of contemporary influence of religious thought on legal thought, evidence indeed of basic connections between the two.