This article considers the question of whether corporate entities can benefit from the criminal-law defence of duress. The excuse of duress is accorded in recognition of the defendant’s extreme fear of a threatened consequence, and it is unclear whether corporate entities—as distinct from their members—can experience fear. Many proponents of corporate rationality deny that corporations can have emotional states. I argue that corporations can experience the fear that is necessary to ground a claim of duress, but that the law should (...) only allow fear to excuse coerced corporate action in a narrow set of circumstances. (shrink)

The philosophy of criminalisation has been a neglected topic for some time now. A considerable amount of modern criminal justice literature is dedicated to preventing crime and punishing crime, but precious little attention is dedicated to the preliminary question: what should be a crime? Over the last decade, five editors and dozens of authors published a four-part series of edited essays in an attempt to answer that question. The present article is a hybrid of sorts: in one sense, it is (...) a review of the essays in that series; but in another sense, this article also makes its own unique contribution by answering two key questions. First, what is criminalisation? And second, how should lawmakers decide what to criminalise? Most importantly, this article suggests a new criminalisation decision-making process in order to ensure the criminal law is a justifiable framework of prohibitions and sanctions. (shrink)