If there is optimism for meaningful regulatory reform of the private sector, it must come from wrestling with the role that law and regulating enforcement should play as a social control of business. The failure to resolve questions of corporate personhood and blame, the duel between the aims of the regulatory state and the progress of business, and the inevitable gaming of regulations and regulators by corporations reflect a fundamental ambivalence over the use of the criminal law as a means of corporate social control. This is one of the best and yet least-offered explanations for the failure of the criminal law to effectively curb corporate deviance during alternating periods of corporate scandals, regulatory reform, and permissiveness. It is also one of the best and yet least-offered explanations for why so little has changed from the turn of one century to the next. The problem of enforcing regulation is more profound than improper revenue and expense recognition, improper asset valuation, and use of merger reserves.

This third program area of the Zicklin Center wrestles with a host of issues relating to the enforcement of regulations from corporate accountability for political spending to standards of corporate liability and culpability. On issues of corporate compliance, corruption, and corporate political accountability, the Zicklin Center actively collaborates with the Center for Political Accountability; Hills Program on Governance and the World Bank.