Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Crisis of Underenforcement
Brand: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Color: Navy
Categories: Books, Law, Business



Dimensions: 6.38 x 0.76 x 9.25 inches
ISBN-13: 978-1523088850
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1523088850
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Print length: 216 pages
Publication date: August 4, 2020
subtitle: Hardcover – August 4, 2020
author: John Coffee
review: Editorial Reviews Review “Professor Coffee’s compelling new approach to holding fraudsters to account is indispensable reading for any lawmaker serious about deterring corporate crime.” —Robert Jackson, Professor of Law, New York University, and former Commissioner, Securities and Exchange Commission “ Corporate Crime and Punishment is a great book that more than any other recent volume deftly explains why effective prosecution of corporate senior executives largely collapsed in the post-2007–2009 stock market crash period and why this creates a crisis of underenforcement. No one is Professor Coffee’s equal in tying together causes for the crisis as disparate as the Justice Department’s 2005 defeat by the Supreme Court in the Arthur Andersen case, the shock of the defeat of the United States Attorney in the Bear Stearns case in 2008, the abdication of any prosecution with respect to Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy in 2008, with such underlying causes as differences in resources between the government and private litigants, misplaced focus on corporations as defendants rather than senior executives, and the rise of deferred prosecution and nonprosecution agreements that allow corporations to investigate themselves with the predictable result that few senior executives are characterized as responsible. Coffee concludes his book with several thoughtful proposals to dramatically improve our system of corporate accountability. While he acknowledges these will be vehemently opposed by the business community, each of his proposals is well worth considering.” —Joel Seligman, author, historian, former law school dean, and President Emeritus, University of Rochester About the Author John C. Coffee Jr. is the Adolf A. Berle Professor of Law and director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School. He is a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been repeatedly listed by the National Law Journal as among its "100 Most Influential Lawyers in America." Coffee has worked as a reporter for the American Law Institute on its Corporate Governance Project and has served on the Legal Advisory Board to the New York Stock Exchange and the SEC's advisory committee on the capital formation and regulatory processes. He is the author or coauthor of seven books, including thirteen editions of his securities casebook.