Corporate Crime and Punishment

“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