Professor Jeremy Horder

This course is available on the LLM (extended part-time), LLM (full-time), MSc in Accounting and Finance, MSc in Criminal Justice Policy, 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 will be relevant to the following LLM specialisms: Banking Law and Financial Regulation Corporate and/or Commercial Law Corporate and Securities Law Criminology and Criminal Justice International Business Law.

This course is capped at 30 students. Students must apply through Graduate Course Choice on LSEforYou.

This course focuses on crime committed within the commercial and business environment. The course considers the principles of corporate criminal liability and the consequences of conviction for a corporation. The exercise of prosecutorial discretion in corporate crime cases, with a consideration of options such as 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. The course concludes with an exploration of the various ways in which a corporation can be abused by fraudulent trading, as well as by organised criminals to conceal the proceeds of their criminal activity. There is no overlap between this course and the course on Financial Crime in the Lent (second) Term.

This course is delivered through a combination of classes and lectures totalling a minimum of 20 hours in Michaelmas Term. Students will usually have two additional hours in the Summer Term. This year teaching will be delivered through recorded online lectures and a mix of both in-person and online classes to accommodate students who are unable to physically be on campus. This course includes a reading week in Week 6 of Michaelmas Term.

One 2,000-word essay.

Reading is prescribed for each lecture and seminar. There are no core textbooks available for the course; however, 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.

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