LL4BK      Half Unit
Corporate Crime

This information is for the 2023/24 session.

Teacher responsible

Professor Jeremy Horder

Availability

This course is available on the LLM (extended part-time), LLM (full-time), MSc in Accounting and Finance, MSc in Regulation, MSc in Risk and Finance and University of Pennsylvania Law School LLM Visiting Students. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

 

This course has a limited number of places and demand is typically high. This may mean that you’re not able to get a place on this course.

Course content

This course focuses on crime committed within the commercial and business environment. The course considers the principles of corporate criminal liability and different models of corporate criminal liability. The exercise of prosecutorial discretion in corporate crime cases, with a consideration of deferred prosecution agreements, is examined. The course addresses the challenges in the international fight against corruption. As well as exploring the nature, extent and consequences of corruption, the course examines the law of fraud and false accounting, as well as international responses to corporate crime and their implementation into domestic law.  The increasing emphasis placed by the law on a company’s obligation to prevent the occurrence of corporate crime is also examined, in relation to fraud, environmental crime and the abuse of human rights. There is no overlap between this course and the course on Financial Crime in the Winter (second) Term.

Teaching

This course will have two hours of teaching content each week in Autumn Term. There will be a Reading Week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

Formative coursework

One 2,000 word essay.

Indicative reading

Reading is prescribed for each lecture and seminar. There are no core textbooks available for the course, although Ashworth’s Principles of Criminal Law (10th edition) has an online chapter – available through LSE library at Oxford Scholarship online -  on Financial Crime that may be of assistance. All the reading material is available from resources easily accessible through LSE Moodle, LSE Electronic Library and the internet. Preliminary reading is not required but for an understanding of the areas covered in the course students may read Wells: Corporations and Criminal Responsibility, 2nd edition, 2001, Oxford University Press; Gobert & Punch: Rethinking Corporate Crime, 2003, Butterworths LexisNexis; Green: Lying, Cheating and Stealing: A Moral Theory of White Collar Crime, 2007, Oxford University Press.

Assessment

Exam (100%, duration: 2 hours, reading time: 15 minutes) in the spring exam period.

Key facts

Department: Law School

Total students 2022/23: 39

Average class size 2022/23: 20

Controlled access 2022/23: Yes

Value: Half Unit

Guidelines for interpreting course guide information

Course selection videos

Some departments have produced short videos to introduce their courses. Please refer to the course selection videos index page for further information.

Personal development skills

  • Communication
  • Specialist skills