Duncan Levin, Esq., Managing Partner of Levin & Associates, PLLC, published a new article in The Regulatory Review, a publication of Penn’s Program on Regulation, examining the Department of Justice’s new corporate enforcement policy and its broader implications for corporate criminal enforcement, compliance, and prosecutorial power.
In the piece, Levin argues that DOJ’s policy should not be understood merely as a technical white-collar update or a set of internal charging guidelines. Rather, it reflects something more consequential: the use of criminal enforcement as a real-time system of corporate governance. By telling companies how quickly to self-disclose, how deeply to investigate themselves, what facts to produce, how to preserve evidence, how to discipline employees, how to remediate, and how to earn leniency, DOJ is doing more than deciding whether to prosecute past misconduct. It is shaping corporate behavior before any charging decision is made, operating through the threat of indictment and the promise of cooperation credit. The article also builds on Levin’s recent analysis in the Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog, where he examined the contrast between the detailed roadmap now available to corporations and the far less predictable path faced by individual defendants in the criminal justice system.
Please click here to read the full article.