Popular Law-making: A study of the origin, history, and present tendencies of law-making by statuteStimson, Frederic Jesup
History
Popular Law-making: A study of the origin, history, and present tendencies of law-making by statute
Stimson, Frederic Jesup
Legislation -- United States
The right of an Englishman not to criminate himself
is too cardinal in our constitutional fabric to be questioned or to be
altered without subverting the whole structure. Practically it would
seem as if a little more intelligence on the part of our prosecutors
would meet the evil. Corporations themselves are never immune; and
unless the wicked official actually slept with all the books of the
corporation under his pillow, it would be hard to imagine a case where
some corporate clerk or subordinate officer could not be subpoenaed
to produce the necessary evidence. Indeed, as has been well argued by
leading American publicists, the sooner the public learns to go behind
the figment of the corporation, the screen of the artificial person,
into the human beings really composing it, the quicker we shall arrive
at a cure for such evils as may exist. Legislation punishing or even
fining an offending corporation is in the last sense ridiculous. It is
necessarily paid by the innocent stockholders or the public. There
is always some one person or a number of persons who have _done_
or suffered the things complained of; after all, every act of the
corporation is necessarily done by some one or more individuals. We
must get over our metaphysical habit of treating corporations as
abstract entities, and again recognize that they are but a definite
number of natural persons bound together only for a few definite
interests and with real men as officers who should be fully
responsible for their actions. Indeed, it ought to be simpler to
detect and punish offenders than in the case of mere individuals
unincorporated, for the very fact that a corporation keeps books and
acts under an elaborate set of by-laws and regulations gives a clew to
its proceedings, and indicates a source of information as to all its
acts. One clerk may therefore reveal, and properly reveal, books and
letters which shall incriminate "those above"; one employee may show
ten thousand persons guilty of an unlawful combination, and properly
so. There is no reason why he should not, and the nine thousand nine
hundred and ninety-nine others deserve, and are entitled to, no
immunity whatever from his revelation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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