Corporate Bodies and Guilty Minds

“Don’t be fooled by the spate of recent corporate scandals and the criminal trials that make us believe that we will not be seeing more of the same again, and again. Business lawbreaking has always been with us and will continue to surface unless we heed the advice offered in Corporate Bodies and Guilty Minds. William Laufer insists that the Enrons, Adelphias, and their criminal kin must themselves be judged by standards that reasonably attribute blame and liability to corporations. The current practice of exonerating entities from guilt and responsibility based on prosecutorial whim and corporate game-playing allows culpable companies to evade deserved punishment. This is a pathbreaking contribution on a critically important subject.”--Gilbert Geis, professor emeritus, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, University of California, Irvine

“William Laufer has made a major contribution to the study of corporate governance. To those who seem satisfied with new proclamations of corporate social responsibility and are optimistic about the efficacy of new laws and regulations that strengthen civil law enforcement he recalls the long history of corporate misbehavior. What is needed, he says, is a more focused use of our criminal laws to make it unmistakably clear that criminal behavior needs criminal punishment. His is a compelling story that needs to be read by anyone concerned about corporate behavior.”—Roderick Hills, former chairman, United States Securities and Exchange Commission

“This is a look at the waxing and waning of business ethics in America, documented with historical, political, and legal precision. Given that we seem to be at the bottom of the business ethics cycle, and that multinational corporations currently have more power to control our lives than many governments do, Laufer’s book is a great and timely review of what reforms have worked in the past, and which ones have failed. This is a plan for taking back America for ordinary Americans using legal change and political reform.”--Howard Dean, chairman, Democratic National Committee

“Laufer’s critique of modern corporate criminal liability begins with a fascinating account of the development of corporate criminal law in the United States. . . . [This] timely work offers a dispassionate analysis of problems relating to corporate crime.”—Harvard Law Review