Professor Jeremy Horder

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 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 has a limited number of places and we cannot guarantee all students will get a place.

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 Lent (second) Term.

This course will have two hours of teaching content each week in Michaelmas Term, either in the form of a two hour seminar or an online lecture and one hour class. There will be 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, although Ashworth’s Principles of Criminal Law (9th edition) has a chapter 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.

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

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