Symposium announcement: Law and the Morality of Punishing Collective Entities

On February 5, 2010 from 9:00 A.M. - 4:15 P.M., Brooklyn Law School will host its David G. Trager Public Symposium.  The topic this year is Sharing the Blame: The Law and Morality of Punishing Public Entities.

About the Program

This Symposium will discuss the nature, ethics, and law of imposing punishment on collective entities. Does it make sense to impose blame on a group as a group, as opposed to its individual members? Even if blame is appropriate, how do we decide the proper form and amount of punishment? How do we even conceive of a group as having its own independent existence or identity? The answers to these questions have significant implications for the scope and enforcement of criminal law. Over the course of several panels, the Symposium will seek to derive broad general insights from various academic disciplines and will consider the practical legal applications of those findings. It will address the psychological processes that lead people to treat groups as having independent existence, and the moral and philosophical consequences of doing so. Later discussion will apply these lessons to the specific legal context of corporate crime.

Panelists include Miriam Baer, Jayne Barnard, Michael Cahill, Meir Dan-Cohen, James Fanto, John Hasnas, Peter Henning, Bertram Malle, Leonard Orland, Steven Sherman, Marion Smiley, Lawrence Solan, Hon. David G. Trager, and Tom Tyler.

RJE