Corporate Crime and Punishment

Why didn't any executives go to prison after the 2008 financial collapse, or in the wake of the opioid crisis? Distinguished Columbia Law School professor John C. Coffee Jr. offers bold proposals that will make it easier to bring corporate wrongdoers to justice.

Federal enforcement efforts sent white collar criminals at Enron and WorldCom to prison. But today, corporations are permitted to enter into deferred prosecution agreements and avoid criminal convictions, largely because enforcement agencies don't have the funding or staff to pursue lengthy prosecutions. Columbia Law Professor John C. Coffee recommends a series of bold proposals for ensuring that corporate malfeasance can once again be punished. He describes incentives that could be offered to both corporate executives to turn in their corporation, and to corporate defendants to turn in their executives, allowing prosecutors to play them off against each other. Whistleblowers should be offered cash bounties to come forward because, Coffee writes, "it is easier and cheaper to buy information than seek to discover it in adversarial proceedings." All federal enforcement agencies should be able to hire outside counsel on a contingency fee basis, which would cost nothing and provide access to discovery and litigation expertise the agencies don't have. Through these and other equally controversial ideas, Coffee intends to rebalance the scales of justice.