AP/CRIM 4657 6.00

Crime And The Corporation

Crosslisted: AP/SOSC 4657

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The sub-prime mortgage crisis. Silicone breast implants. Deteriorating food quality. These are all examples of harmful practices associated with the activities of modern corporations. However, rather than crimes, these harms are usually treated as regulatory, administrative, or ethical breaches, or simply as the costs of doing business, and are thus subject to limited media coverage, public awareness, and legal sanction. This course engages with exactly this tension between the seriousness of corporate harm on the one hand, and the limited societal, legal, and regulatory responses on the other while exploring four key themes. First, attention is devoted to the question of whether it is even appropriate to define corporate harms as ‘crimes’ and thus include them under the umbrella of ‘criminology.’ Second, the course examines the challenges associated with identifying and documenting these harmful practices and defining them as legitimate legal violations, a challenge of knowledge or knowledgeability rooted in the intersections between law, science, and the media. A third theme is how to account for these practices. While many mainstream and some academic, accounts focus on notions of individual or systemic greed, the focus is on how these practices are rooted in larger organizational, social, political, and economic contexts ranging from neo-liberalism to modes of production and consumption, to the forms of governance to which we are all subject on a daily basis. Finally, we will survey different policy responses including public regulation, self-regulation, and consumer campaigns. Each of these themes is examined in reference to four different types of corporate harm: (1) harms against the market; (2) harms against consumers; (3) harms against workers; and (4) harms against the environment. This thus course seeks to challenge the very boundaries of criminology and to examine the merits of expanding the field to include contributions from other disciplines and areas of research while at the same time providing a very different view of the links between law, crime, and power.