커먼로 국가의 기업살인죄의 검토 - 기업 고유의 형사책임 인정을 위한 기업문화론적 접근방법 -

A Corporation is a creature of law and run by people who act as its agent. Corporations have rights and obligations in their own name. But they can commit crimes? Commonwealth jurisdictions have traditionally approached corporate criminal responsibility using “vicarious liability” or “identification principle” that locates its criminal liability derivatively through the culpability of individual actors. But since the 1990s, some countries like UK, Australia have enacted legislation which makes corporations criminally liable on the basis of management failure. This article begins with a discussion of the limitation of the common law doctrine and a general review of the nature of organizational fault, and then provides a critical analysis of how corporate criminal liability is conceptualized in the UK, Australia and Canada. The author argues that the strategy of Individualism in the criminal law fails to capture the significance of the corporate operation, because the traditional concept of individual wrongdoing presupposes personal quantities such as the capacity to choose freely which cannot be effectively applied to the corporate body. It is suggested that the corporate culture model in the Australian “Criminal Code Act 1995” might be a promising alternative.