Legal Person
A legal person or a juristic person is a person created by the law for legal purpose. These are not human beings. The legal persons have legal rights, they are represented in the court of law by their authorised representatives.
Examples of Legal Persons
1. Corporations
2. State
3. Deities
4. Animals
5. Rivers
Corporate Criminal Liability - Doctrine of Respondeat Superior
The doctrine of corporate criminal liability is essentially the doctrine of respondeat superior which has been imported into criminal law from law of torts. This doctrine states that a corporation can be made criminally liable and convicted for the unlawful acts of any of its agents or representatives, provided those agents were acting within the scope of their actual or apparent authority. Apparent authority is that authority which an agent can be inferred to have by an average reasonable person, whereas actual authority is authority that a corporation knowingly entrusts to its agent or employee.
Essentials of Corporate Criminal Liability
(i) Act within the scope of employment: The employee committing the offence must be acting within the scope of his employment,
(ii) Benefit to the Corporation: The act must be done for the benefit of the corporation. The benefit may be indirect or direct. The corporation may or may not enjoy the benefit completely.
Methods of making Corporations Liable
Courts today have devised a number of methods and ideologies to impute the employee’s actions and knowledge to the parent corporation to stamp out illegalities from the economic sphere of life:
(i) The Collective Blindness Doctrine
Courts have found corporations liable even when it wasn’t a single individual who was at fault. The Courts considered the sum knowledge of all the employees to come to this conclusion. This is known as the “Collective Blindness Doctrine”. The rationale behind this is to prevent corporations from compartmentalizing their work and duties in such a way that it becomes elementary for them to evade liability by pleading ignorance in the event of any criminal prosecution.
(ii) Willful Blindness Doctrine
Corporations are made criminally liable if they knowingly turn a blind eye to ongoing criminal activities. If a corporate agent becomes suspicious of some ongoing illegal acts but to avoid culpability, he takes no action to mitigate the damage or investigate further or bring the offender to book, the corporation becomes liable.
(iii) Conspiracies
A conspiracy has been traditionally defined as two or more people who agree to commit an offence, with one or more people taking affirmative action to further the aim of the conspiracy. Corporations can be made liable for a criminal conspiracy amongst its employees or involving one employee and others not on the payroll of the corporation.
(iv) Mergers, Dissolutions and Liability
Corporations can be made criminally liable for the previous criminal acts and violations of another corporation with which it has merged or has consolidated. Corporations, after a merger, will also have to defend themselves against charges of conspiracy against the predecessor corporation. Similarly, it is not always necessary that corporations will evade prosecution if dissolution occurs before filing of charges. Depending on the law of the land, sometimes even defunct corporations are forced to defend themselves against criminal prosecution.
(v) Misprision of Felony
A corporation may also be held liable for misprision of felony, that is the offence of concealing and failing to report a felony. This consists of four elements:
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