Corporate Manslaughter and Regulatory Reform provides an innovative account of the emergence of new corporate manslaughter offences to criminalize deaths in the workplace during the last twenty years. This has occurred in many different national jurisdictions, but this book shows how these developments can be understood as a coherent phenomenon. It identifies the historical and legal origins of the instrumentalism that has limited the ability of health and safety regulation to respond effectively to work-related death cases, and explains how and why criminal law came to be used as a means of addressing these limitations by reinforcing the moral values underpinning regulation. The contemporary neo-liberal political context is shown to have posed fundamental challenges to systems of safety regulation, and created an environment in which the criminal law is seen as an effective and desirable means of delivering important moral and symbolic messages that regulation cannot communicate effectively itself.

This book provides an account of the international emergence of corporate manslaughter offences to criminalise deaths in the workplace during the last twenty years, identifying the limitations of health and safety regulation that have prompted this development.