Corporate punishment has a branding problem. Criminal sanctions should call out wrongdoing and condemn wrongdoers. In a world where generic corporate misconduct is a daily affair, conviction singles out truly contemptible practices from merely sharp, unproductive, or undesirable ones. In this way, criminal law gives victims the recognition they deserve, deters future wrongdoers who want to preserve their good name, and publicly reinforces society's most treasured values. Unfortunately, corporate punishment falls far short of all these communicative ambitions. For punishment to convey its intended message, society must be able to hear about it. When courts convict individuals, everyone understands that the conviction places a mark of enduring stigma: "felon," "thief," "murderer," and "fraudster." The state reinforces this communique by reserving its harshest and most degrading treatment for individual criminals, caging them and possibly killing them. Corporate punishment, by contrast, is a fleeting affair diluted by civil and administrative off-ramps, public relations spin, and a frenetic media environment. In today's criminal justice system, it can be hard to identify who the corporate criminals even are. Unsurprisingly, corporations view criminal charges as inconvenient economic uncertainties and criminal fines as mere costs of doing business. Public perceptions have largely followed suit. Corporate criminal law could disrupt this perverse dynamic by adopting a new sanction that would "brand" corporate criminals. Although branding sanctions could take many forms - different visual marks of varying size - this Article calls for, at a minimum, appending a criminal designation, (f), to corporate felons' legal names and mandating its appearance on products and communications. This "corporate criminal brand" would stand as a twenty-first century corporate reimagining of its medieval corporal namesake. Lawmakers rightly rejected physical brands on individual criminals long ago. The criminal justice landscape is different for corporations, which feel no pain and have no dignity interests. Unlike monetary fines, corporate criminal branding would unambiguously signal a corporation's criminal status to outside observers. By forcibly integrating corporations' criminal identity into their public image, criminal law might finally have a way to recognize victims and strike at what corporations value most.

Can you name 10 corporate criminals? Bernie Madoff, Martha Steward, and Jeff Skilling don’t count – they are individuals, not businesses. How about just five? Three? It’s surprising the task should be so difficult. Corporate crime inflicts upwards of 20 times more economic damage each year than all street crime. Brand-name corporations find themselves on the wrong side of the law for everything from accounting fraud to homicide to narcotics dealing. Yet many people, including most law students and even some law professors, don’t even know that corporate criminal law exists.In a forthcoming paper, we argue that widespread ignorance about corporate crime and corporate criminals reflects a systemic problem for business law, as well as a missed opportunity. Corporate criminal enforcement needs a marketing makeover. When prosecutors and agencies ignore basic marketing principles, they undermine the deterrent impact of the public, expressive act inherent in corporate criminal enforcement. These failures of communication undermine the most basic moral and preventive aspirations of corporate criminal law. This is an unforced error that some creative thinking and attention to marketing basics could begin to remedy right now, without even requiring much additional expense.

A recent wave of expressive accounts of corporate criminal law operate on the promise that corporate punishment can express a unique form of condemnation not capturable through civil enforcement. Unfortunately, the realities of corporate sentencing have thus far failed to make good on this expressive promise. Viewed in light of existing conventions that imbue meaning into our practices of punishment, corporate sentences rarely impose hard treatment in a manner or degree that these conventions seem to require. Accordingly, standard corporate sanctions turn out to be ill-suited to deliver—and, often, will likely undermine—the stigmatic punch upon which expressive defenses of corporate criminal law depend. A common response to this conventional problem with corporate sentencing has been to propose more, and harsher, corporate punishments. However, this approach overlooks the extent to which corporate punishment derives its stigmatic force from preexisting norms and conventions concerning individual punishment. If trying to improve corporate punishment, then, expressivists might instead seek either to leverage or to dismantle the underlying conventions that give existing sanctions meaning. An example of the former strategy would be to revitalize long-neglected proposals for corporate shaming by adopting a criminal convention currently absent from the corporate space—namely, the pervasive, stigmatic application of epithets like “thief” or “felon.” An example of the latter would be to join criminal justice reformers in targeting conventions that, in recent decades, have enabled increasingly draconian sentencing practices. On this view, dissolving corporate sentencing’s conventional problem may represent a further, incidental benefit of systemic criminal justice reform.

If there is any consensus in the fractious debates over corporate punishment, it is this: a corporation cannot be imprisoned, incarcerated, jailed, or otherwise locked up. Whatever fiction the criminal law entertains about corporate personhood, having an actual “body to kick” — and, by extension, a body to throw into prison — is not one of them. The ambition of this project is not to reject this obvious point, but rather to challenge the less-obvious claim it has come to represent: incapacitation, despite long being a textbook justification for punishing individuals, does not bear on the criminal law of corporations. In this Article, I argue that incapacitation both can and should serve as a justification for punishing criminal corporations. Descriptively, I interrogate how rote appeals to the impossibility of corporate imprisonment obscure more pressing, challenging questions about whether and to what extent the criminal law can vindicate an account of incapacitation that extends to corporate persons. Excavating a richer conceptual framework for incapacitation from our practices of individual punishment, I demonstrate that sanctions we already impose in or just outside the criminal law can be better understood as efforts to incapacitate, rather than to deter or rehabilitate, a criminal corporation. Indeed, reevaluating our understanding of penal incapacitation provides reason to think that we have similar and perhaps stronger reasons for incapacitating corporate persons than we do individuals. Prescriptively, I leverage this comparative framework to argue that incapacitation should be recognized as a core justification for corporate punishment. Although rehabilitation has gained traction in past decades as a basis for punishing corporations, incapacitation stands as a more realistic, more administrable, alternative. This is because a principle of rehabilitation has led to a practice of imposing on corporations intricately designed, but dubiously effective, compliance and internal governance reforms. Incapacitation, by contrast, lends itself to clear, discrete prohibitions for which the criminal law is better situated to justify, impose, and monitor.

The Supreme Court concluded in 1909 that a corporation, like an individual, can be held criminally responsible for its misconduct. Yet even now, corporate-criminal liability has yet to overcome the same skeptical argument it faced then — and, for that matter, for centuries prior. The skeptic’s challenge appears as simple as it is persistent: Lacking a mind distinct and independent from its constitutive stakeholders, a corporation cannot produce the sorts of intentional attitudes needed to satisfy the law’s mens rea component. In other words, a corporation is straightforwardly incapable of satisfying one of criminal law’s most basic requirements. Accordingly, to the skeptic the very idea of corporate-criminal liability is, and always has been, pure nonsense. Though it presents as a simple, common-sense challenge to a corporation’s ability to intend — criminally or otherwise — unpacking the skeptic’s critique quickly implicates profound considerations regarding the nature of personhood and proper methods of attribution. Animating the dispute between skeptics and proponents of corporate-criminal liability is a disagreement over how to evaluate personhood, and further how one’s conception of personhood licenses attributions of actions, attitudes, and ultimately responsibility to the entity in question. This brand of disagreement is nothing new: These themes recur throughout Western thought and extend far beyond corporate law, from Plato’s Phaedo to Boethius and Bartolus of Sassoferato, from Thomas Hobbes to John Locke. Given the intellectual lineage behind what is otherwise an ordinary policy disagreement, perhaps it should not be terribly surprising that skepticism about corporate-criminal liability was never put to rest. I don’t expect that we can break this conceptual stalemate all at once, if at all, to solve the challenge facing corporate crime. More to the point, we don’t need to. As it turns out, in taking up this very dispute at the turn of the 20th century, courts and legislature sided with the proponents of corporate crime in a way that the skeptic cannot, or at least should not want to, unwind. The proponents of corporate-criminal liability did not just win the policy fight; they did so in a way that rendered the skeptic’s position incompatible with broader theoretical commitments that are now instrumental to the modern corporation.This Article offers two contributions to the debate over corporate-criminal liability: one conceptual, and one practical. First, the same argument embraced by today’s skeptics was tried but rejected in the late 1800s, when the practice of holding corporations responsible first developed. Courts previously receptive to the skeptic’s reasoning abandoned the view — and more importantly, the relationship between personhood and attribution underwriting it — as increasingly untenable amidst a changing economic environment in which commercial corporations transformed from tiny, narrowly constrained, quasi-state entities to sprawling, sophisticated, dominant participants in the national marketplace. Meanwhile, the gradual embrace of corporate liability, both in tort and crime, is intimately connected to the simultaneous demotion of corporate law as a regulatory tool. The turn towards corporate-criminal liability thus reflects a broader abandonment both of a long-dominant conception of personhood and of an approach to corporate regulation rendered ineffective by the development of what has become the basis for our modern corporate law. In a slogan, corporations today are persons under the criminal law not because they have always been eligible, but rather because they became eligible.Second, a clear theoretical understanding of how and why courts first held corporations criminally responsible has profound consequences for how and why we continue to hold them responsible today. Most directly, recognizing the conditions under which corporations became persons for the purposes of criminal law removes from contemporary debates one complaint with modern practice, and does so without having to resolve some deep metaphysical truth about the ultimate nature of personhood. Today’s skeptic of corporate capacities presupposes an outdated premise about how capacities should be attributed to a person, the abandonment of which is pivotal to creating and maintaining modern corporate law and today’s commercial corporation. Taking seriously the skeptic’s position, on this discovery, threatens to undermine the conceptual foundation integral to a regulatory framework making commercial corporations what they are today. In addition, taking seriously courts’ actual reasoning in holding corporations criminally responsible unearths both a method and rationale for continuing to do so, which is rooted in a constellation of fairness considerations towards individuals that, although mostly lost to history, nevertheless applies more strongly today than ever before. Commitment to this qualified anti-discrimination norm applies at least as powerfully today as it did a century ago: Far from being a once-excusably incoherent, now-superfluous practice, corporate-criminal liability has as much reason to exist today as it did upon inception.

The federal government has used criminal fines to punish corporations for as long as it has been punishing corporations. Yet to this day, with more than a century in which to get the punishment right, corporate-criminal fines fail to satisfy virtually any standard justification that underlies criminal punishment.

The law has long recognized a presumption against criminal strict liability. This Note situates that presumption in terms of moral intuitions about the role of intention and the unique nature of criminal punishment. Two sources recent laws from state legislatures and recent advances in moral philosophy pose distinct challenges to the presumption against strict liability crimes. This Note offers a solution to the philosophical problem that informs how courts could address the legislative problem. First, it argues that the purported problem from philosophy stems from a mistaken relationship drawn between criminal law and morality. Second, it outlines a slightly more nuanced moral framework that both accommodates recent thinking in philosophy and preserves the correspondence between moral theory and criminal law that underwrites the presumption against criminal strict liability. Finally, it considers how the contours of this moral framework could inform judicial efforts to accommodate and constrain new criminal strict liability laws.