Letter vs. Spirit: The Evolution of Compliance into Ethics

摘要

Traditional legal analysis dictates that the presence of the word "and" between two nouns implies that both the element before and the element after are required. With regard to regulations and guidance that have emerged in the wake of corporate scandal, we see the requirement for compliance and ethics, yet only compliance and the efforts to prevent legal misconduct receive prosecutorial and sentencing attention. We questioned how the law has evolved to focus on compliance at the expense of ethics and we looked to related empirical studies to see whether there was support for redirecting that evolution so that ethical behavior might become part of a prosecutorial and sentencing equation.