Corporate Criminal Liability for Homicide and Economic Growth: A Doctrinal and Comparative Study

Abstract

The corporation occupies a paradoxical position in modern legal and economic life: it is simultaneously the principal engine of growth and a recurring source of catastrophic harm. Nowhere is this paradox sharper than in the field of corporate homicide, where organisational failures in the management of safety produce death on a scale that no individual offender could achieve. This paper examines the relationship between regimes of corporate criminal liability for homicide and the broader objective of economic growth. Adopting a doctrinal and comparative methodology and drawing exclusively on secondary data, it analyses the legal frameworks of five representative jurisdictions; India, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and Canada, against the backdrop of the leading theories of corporate fault: the identification doctrine, vicarious (respondeat superior) liability, and the organisational or ‘corporate culture’ model. The study advances three central claims. First, the conventional framing of corporate criminal liability as a brake on enterprise is incomplete; properly calibrated liability internalises the social cost of unsafe production, protects the human and physical capital on which growth depends, and strengthens the legal certainty that attracts long-horizon investment. Second, the relationship between the severity of corporate criminal liability and economic growth is non-linear: both under-deterrence (impunity) and over-deterrence (disproportionate or unpredictable sanctions) impose growth costs, suggesting an optimal ‘calibration zone’. Third, India having recodified its general criminal law through the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 without enacting a dedicated corporate homicide offence continues to occupy the under-deterrence end of this spectrum, generating an accountability deficit that is itself a source of regulatory uncertainty. The paper concludes with calibrated reform proposals, including a statutory corporate homicide offence, a corporate-culture standard of attribution, structured sentencing, and negotiated-resolution mechanisms designed to reconcile deterrence with enterprise.