Author Description

When corporate employees commit crimes, it gives rise to questions about the extent to which their superiors should be held responsible for those crimes. The General Section of the German Criminal Code does not adequately address these questions because it has been developed for typical micro crimes. This study aims to fill this gap in the law. By adopting the concept of superior responsibility from International Criminal Law, it offers a way to prevent a superior from benefitting from "organized irresponsibility", which mostly leads to corporate conduct going unpunished on the superior levels. The study begins with detailed analyses of German criminal statutes and the use of superior responsibility in International Criminal Law. These lay the foundation for a proposed statute holding superiors criminally liable for the criminal actions of their agents as well as for economic offenses. The proposed statute is analyzed for consistency with German constitutional law and EC law and interaction with principles of criminology.