Suchergebnisse

Corporate responsibility for crimes that require thought, or lack of thought, has been the subject of much debate both in the UK and worldwide. This article investigates the current position in the UK, where a Bill is currently (October 2006) before Parliament, and briefly in Australia, where the law has been reformed at Commonwealth level, but not yet implemented in individual States. In line with developments in Australian and the UK law a realist rather than nominalist position is taken that explicitly recognises genuine corporate fault. The article looks forward to the cases that are likely to be brought under the "corporate culture" provisions. It suggests that the practical methods of providing evidence of corporate 'attitudes, policies, systems or accepted practices' could very well include the records of meetings, very much in line withthe method attempted in the failed Transco prosecution in Scotland. It issubmitted that the conceptual foundation for the realist approach is sound and that there are practical ways of bringing the company before the court. However, there are also some conceptual and practical difficulties to be faced. Issues identified include the question of responsibility for sub-cultures and the practical problem of a proliferation of different sorts of evidence and expert opinions that could be put before the courts.

This article argues, first, that new theoretical ways of thinking about companies are coming to the fore and, second, that these new ways of thinking are finding their way into some aspects of company law and regulation. Snider's device of tracking the emergence of new ideas as `journey from academic journal to economic policy to law' is employed in support of the article's main argument. In particular, it is submitted that the idea of the firm as a `nexus of contracts' is being replaced by the idea of the firm as a `behavioural entity'. While management and economics theorists have gone `inside the black box' in order to ask different questions and produce better theories, the law has arrived there via a much more pragmatic route. However, recent developments in two areas of company law and regulation, corporate criminal responsibility in the UK and Australia and corporate governance in the UK, can be seen in terms of a move away from a focus on the individual decision maker and towards the concept of corporate culture.

In May 2000 the government proposed the introduction of a new offence of corporate killing founded on the concept of "management failure". Two specific corporate risks are investigated; the risk that the company's operations will kill one of its employees or a member of the public and the risk that the company will be convicted of an offence indicating corporate responsibility for that killing. The article demonstrates, firstly, that the risks associated with corporate killing fall within the ambit of the Turnbull Guidance. More importantly, it uses this particular, not directly financial, example to illustrate the proposition that Turnbull should not be associated with closure; rather it should be associated with the opening of a new level of corporate governance debate that will focus on corporate behaviour rather than corporate policy.

Feminist debate has moved away from an emphasis on how women differ from men and towards acknowledgement of differences among women. This article explores a division of growing importance for the new millennium: the division between women who choose to remain childless and those who choose to become mothers. The article demonstrates that more women are choosing to remain childless in the UK and the USA. It claims that the increase in childlessness is a demographic trend that is affecting the whole of the western, developed world. The main point of the article is to suggest that the way sex discrimination law is currently structured means that the demographic change identified will work to the disadvantage of both mothers and not-mothers.