Principles of the Law, Compliance and Enforcement for Organizations is now available to purchase on the LexisNexis website. This is the first time that The American Law Institute has produced Principles on this area of the law. Work began in 2015 under the leadership of Reporter Geoffrey P. Miller of New York University School of Law and Associate Reporters Jennifer H. Arlen of New York University School of Law, James A. Fanto of Brooklyn Law School, and Claire A. Hill of University of Minnesota Law School.
“The basis of this project comes out of the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, where we had an enormous growth in fines and criminal prosecutions of organizations for various misconduct and misdeeds,” said Reporter Geoffrey Miller at the project’s approval by membership. “This caused a very powerful set of discussions and set many legal minds thinking about, what is a way to both enforce the law against organizations’ misconduct, but also to encourage organizations to enforce the law on themselves, through the processes of compliance.”
This subject matter is one that combines legal and ethical standards. It deals with both externally imposed norms, such as laws and regulations, and internally imposed norms, such as corporate codes of ethics. And it is developed through discretionary actions of regulators and prosecutors and through settlements of enforcement proceedings that do not carry the force of generally binding law. Accordingly, the best course is to set out best-practice standards that may or may not draw on underlying legal norms. The Principles seeks to provide best practices for a variety of public and private entities, but its main audience is large, publicly traded corporations.