What effect did the erosion of the mens rea requirement have on corporate liability?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Strict liability offenses are those for which no state of mind is required. These generally are cases in which corporate employees failed to take some action required by a regulation. For example, under most blue-sky laws (state securities regulations), it is a violation to file a false statement of a company's financial condition with a state's secretary of state. Filing a false statement is a crime, even if the corporate officer filing the statement believed it was true, as no state of mind is required to commit the crime. The courts then began to impose liability on corporations for criminal acts of the employees by imputing the state of mind of the employee to the corporation. Today, as a general rule, the only crimes for which a corporation is not held liable are those that are punishable only by incarceration. Obviously, the rationale for this rule is that the punishment could not be carried out. Some states have eliminated this problem by passing a statute providing specific fines for corporations that commit offenses otherwise punishable by incarceration only.
Many corporate executives may not realize the extent to which a corporation today can be held liable for the acts of its employees. That liability can extend down to acts of even the lowest-level employees and even to acts in violation of corporate directives, as long as two conditions are met. First, the conduct must be within the scope of the employee agent's authority. Second, the action must have been undertaken, at least in part, to benefit the corporation. Many states have passed statutes imposing criminal liability on partnerships under the same circumstances as those under which liability is imposed on a corporation. In the absence of such a statute, liability is not imposed on the partnership because a partnership is not a legal person.