the potential for criminalizing corporate deviance is more likely to be realied when there can be no claim of consent by victims of corporate activities to the harms inflicted, and when acknowledgement of this will not challenge the very basis of the system. this will be the case in environmental destruction cases and in many consumer-harming ones. when harms inflicted on nature or on people who did not contract directly with the wrongdoing corporations, it is far more difficult to argue that there was an implicit consent to the injuries. the use of the criminal law in these kinds of situations cannot be deflected as easily. indeed, even in cases in which there is some argument for consent to the potential of injury, the law has had to concede that the consent basis for averting the application of enforcement based on moral fault-finding has little weight. thus, in the case of the tobacco industry's liabilities, the consent by the victims was not allowed to stand in the way of finding of culpability, albeit only civil culpability so far. what the jury decisions reflected was that the corporations' lying and coverups were anathema and that this wrongdoing needed to be publicly condemned, even if the victims may have been foolish in giving their consent to some harm.
Anarchist