Själ att döma - En komparativ studie av juridiska personers straffrättsliga ansvar

Sammanfattning: This thesis examines criminal liability for legal persons. The examination has been done in several parts. It starts generally and becomes more specific over the course of the thesis. In order to examine how criminal law and legal persons interact with each other the thesis starts by establishing the retributive and utilitarian purposes and functions of criminal law. The interactions between retributivism and utilitarianism can be viewed in one of two ways: The first option is that the acts of criminalization and punishment have, separately and in themselves, utilitarian and retributive purposes. The second option is that different crimes contain different amounts of utilitarianism and retributivism. A distinguishing trait of criminal law is the “moral voice”, expressing the moral blameworthiness of crimes. There is an increasing will to blame legal persons for harmful incidents within their operations. At the same time, the deterrent effect of criminalization on legal persons is unclear. Legal persons interact with criminal law differently than natural persons. Since legal persons are fundamentally different from natural persons and criminal law mainly is made for natural persons, the purposes, functions and principles of criminal law look different when applied to legal persons. Criminality within the operations of legal persons is difficult to discover and difficult to prevent. Furthermore, it’s common. There are a several ways to convict legal persons of crimes exist. The thesis is limited to examining the methods used in the UK and Australia. These methods are different variations of vicarious liability (where a legal person is responsible for the actions of its agents), the identification doctrine (where some individuals in management positions whose actions are the actions of the legal person) and direct liability such as the one in Criminal Code Act 1995 (where mens rea can be established via aggregated factors or company culture).