A corporation is an artificial legal person, existing only in the contemplation of law, having perpetual succession and common seal. Can a corporation commit crime, for its inability to form mens rea? If yes, then can it be accused of crimes as grave as homicide? Even post the Bhopal Gas Tragedy and the Uphaar Cinema Tragedy, absence of legislation such as the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act, 2007 (UK) is no less a pity. Absolute liability theory (coupled with deep-pocket theory), though is an improvisation over the strict liability theory but has failed to ensure corporate criminal deterrence. This book is an attempt to ponder over issues relating to corporate criminal behaviour, in particular 'corporate homicide' and 'corporate manslaughter'.

This book provides an account of the international emergence of corporate manslaughter offences to criminalise deaths in the workplace during the last twenty years, identifying the limitations of health and safety regulation that have prompted this development.

Business corporations wield enormous economic power, and legal structures largely serve their interests. This book analyses the background to the demands to use criminal law sanctions against corporations, including demand for corporate manslaughter.

Every year in the UK, hundreds of workers are killed just doing their jobs, thousands more die of illnesses caused by their work and tens of thousands suffer major injuries such as amputations, loss of sight, serious burns, and so on. Worldwide, two million people are killed by work each year. Yet with the exception of high profile cases such as the gas leak at Bhopal, India, which killed tens of thousands, this crime wave fails to attract the interest of the politicians, the media or - least forgiveably of all - the knowledge industry of criminology. This book is concerned with crimes against worker and public safety, providing an account and analysis of this increasingly important field, and setting this within the broader context of corporate and white-collar crime. It uses case studies and original analyses of official data to illustrate key points and themes, drawing upon both well known and high profile instances of safety crimes as well the mass of ubiquitous 'mundane' or 'routine' deaths and injuries. Thus the book examines how much safety crime is there, how are such offences rendered invisible, and how can their extent be unearthed accurately? Throughout the book the authors analyse the social, legal and political processes that ensure that safety crimes remain subject to under-enforcement and under-criminalisation. This analysis identifies key moments in the historical development of criminal law and regulation, and assesses the prospects for criminalising safety crimes in the context of contemporary neo-liberal regulatory policies. The theoretical and political justifications for dominant approaches to the regulation and sanctioning of safety criminals are subject to critique in order to develop alternative, more effective, means of criminalisation and punishment. The book concludes with an original analysis of safety crimes that allows us to understand the complexities of the conditions of their production, and develop a more realistic appraisal of the prospects for their amelioration.

This open access book addresses several questions regarding the implementation of human and organisational factors (HOF) so that recent improvements in industrial safety can be built upon. It addresses sources of frustration in senior management with high expectations of operational recommendations and disquiet on the part of HOF specialists struggling to have an impact on high-level decision making. The brief explores these issues with an emphasis on examples and lessons learned based on the experience of its authors, who come from different academic disciplines and various industrial sectors such as oil and gas, energy and transportation. It then offers some ways forward for a better consideration of HOF in hazardous companies with a view of promoting safety and facing challenges in a rapidly changing world.

In relation to Nigeria, this book attempts to proffer answers to the following liability questions: what rationale, if any, exists to justify the imposition of criminal liability on corporations?

'Criminal Law' is written with the needs of the student foremost in mind to provide, more than ever, as modern and as comprehensive an exposition of the criminal law as he or she could possibly require.

Presenting an engaging critique of current criminal justice practice in the UK and USA, this book introduces central questions of criminal law theory. It develops a forceful argument that the prevailing justifications for punishment are misguided, and have resulted in the systematic infliction of unnecessary human misery.