Over the
past two decades, a number of states in the Global North have introduced laws
aimed at holding corporations criminally liable. While there is an important
literature examining these legal regimes there is a paucity of comparative work
interrogating the different political struggles and processes leading to
corporate criminal liability (CCL) legislation. This paper addresses this
lacuna by comparing and contrasting the development of CCL in Canada and
Finland. By scrutinizing the law reform processes in each jurisdiction, the
paper documents how CCL emerged under different conjunctures in each country,
yet were shaped similarly by hegemonic beliefs in the non-criminal status of
corporation, the importance of advancing private enterprise and established
jurisprudence. Of particular note are the ways in which dominant notions of
legal individualism and the universal legal subject constrained legislative
efforts to hold corporations criminally to account therein preventing corporate
misconduct from being processed as “real” crimes.