Straffansvar och modern brottslighet. En idékritisk studie av straffansvar för juridiska personer

Sammanfattning: This thesis seeks to explore critically the idea of corporate criminal responsibility. The criminal responsibility of corporations is constructed as a criminal responsibility of legal persons. As an expression of criminal policy, criminal responsibility of corporations is often understood as a response to harms and risks stemming from the economic and industrial sectors of society. The central theme is that the idea of corporate criminal responsibility corresponds to a human experience of lack of control. Criminal law rests on the notion of individual moral agency. This notion of criminal responsibility is part of a liberal individualist ideology. The criminal act is represented as an event occuring at a decontextualised moment in time, where an identifiable and unique individual perpetrator intervenes in the world, with harmful consequences. In contrast, descriptions of events in the industrial and economic sectors of society are often characterized by disunity and division. Harmful events in this context are thus not the result of identifiable individual action. It is the argument of this thesis that the idea of a criminal responsibility of legal persons is an attempt by legal doctrine to solve the ideological and conceptual difficulties that arise in the intersection between traditional criminal law and the human experience of risk, uncertainty and harmful events originating from the economic and industrial sectors of modern society. This argument is supported, inter alia, by anthropological theories on how human experiences of fears and risks are structured culturally. The conclusion is that criminal law makes the legal person responsible for those areas of human experience where traditional legal doctrine has reached its ideological limit.