Corporate and White Collar Crime is a vast and rapidly growing field of law. This course explores its core structures, development over time, key substantive areas of regulation and enforcement, the role of prosecutorial discretion, the growth of compliance efforts and internal investigations, and matters of strategy for both prosecutors and defense counsel as well as recent issues and those on the horizon.
Our journey begins by describing the key doctrines of corporate and white collar crime and examining how this field of law has grown historically, politically and comparatively. This will also involve attempting to understand its economic significance. We then explore a number of substantive areas of law that form the primary focus of corporate and white collar crime practice. This includes mail & wire fraud, securities fraud and insider trading, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and bribery more generally, money laundering and financial institution crime, perjury and obstruction, topics in environmental crime, and RICO. Following this we detail the primary procedural and sanctioning issues that arise, including many Constitutional protections that may be implicated. We then delve into the institutional architecture of this field by discussing enforcement practice and the rise of deferred prosecution agreements and certain official U.S. Department of Justice memos describing enforcement policy and practice. This will include discussion of the rise of compliance efforts, internal investigations, and some of the issues these may raise (e.g., Upjohn warnings, attorney-client privilege, systems of information gathering).
We then address issues of strategy for prosecutors and defense counsel through not only readings, but also interactions with those in practice. We conclude by examining both recent issues and those likely to arise in the near future including the globalization of corporate and white collar crime.
Students should have completed #657 Enterprise Organization or #723 Corporate Lawyer: Law & Ethics (or be doing either concurrently with this class) or have obtained prior permission from the instructor to enroll.