Corporate Risk-Taking and Killing

This paper assesses the law's response to companies whose dangerous and unsafe practices have caused injury or death to an employee or member of the public. While civil law responses are briefly mentioned, the focus of the paper is on the construction of criminal offences to deal with such corporate violence. The paper traces the developments over the past ten years which have increasingly led to such cases being embraced within the mainstream of criminal offences (for example, successful prosecutions for corporate manslaughter) and to significantly enhanced levels of fines being imposed.