Due to the continuously growing powers of corporate actors, the increasing harms they cause, and the difficulties to identify the responsible individuals, in order to place the responsibility where it belongs, the vast majority of west-ern democratic jurisdictions added the criminal or quasi-criminal liability of legal entities (CCL) to their legal systems. Yet, the CCL laws - usually shaped by the struggle between the demand to effectively regulate and punish corpo-rate wrongdoing on the one hand, and the strive for economic progress rein-forced by the fundamental principles of criminal law on the other - consist-ently fail to capture the structural harms and are thus continously being amended. Poland as a post-communist country struggling with the political, social and economic transition is an interesting case for reviewing the concept of CCL. The Law on Liability of Legal Entities for Acts punishable under Crim-inal Law was introduced there in 2002, after a very short legislation process. Since its enactment, it has been heavily criticized and amended a dozen times. At the time of writing, Polish legislator is planning to introduce a much stricter law on corporate criminal liability. This script is an extended version of the doctoral dissertation defended on January 7th 2020 at the European University Viadrina in Germany.
This script revisits the dilemma of corporate criminal liability as a regulatory response to corporate wrongdoing. The comparative approach contributes to the understanding of the concept and the changing nature of CCL laws within the European, civil law jurisdictions. This is particularly relevant in the view of the upcoming reform of corporate criminal liability laws both in Poland and in Germany. Even though the corporate liability laws have been extensively studied in Germany in a comparative context, the case of a neighboring coun-try Poland remains understudied. Moreover, the majority of comparative studies of CCL focus on dogmatic analysis and comparison of the laws in the books, while laws in action and their emergence and development are ne-glected. Employing the historical and the law-in-context perspective, this book explores the historical origin of the present day corporate criminal lia-bility laws in Poland, the factors that influenced the law reform process and the way CCL is enforced. In addition, the books offers an in-depth analysis and evaluation of the reform attempt from 2019. In so doing, this book closes a persistent gap in German analysis of corporate criminal liability laws. The study is based on original, qualitative analysis of 105 unpublished court cases collected from the Polish district courts, supplemented by analysis of legisla-tive documents and secondary sources.