Corruption and new concepts of punitive law: Towards an AntiCorruption Intervention Law?

Abstract

Corruption was already handled by the legal system as an illegal practice, even before the arrival of its global prohibition regime, and criminal law methods to deal with this problem were already designed, with varying degrees of sophistication, by various past cultures. The Law uses its more traditional technique, the threat of punishment directed against those who practice the conduct described as corruption within the Law itself. The risk society has led, in Law, to the establishment and expansion of the category of collective legal goods, where it’s inserted the regulation of acts of corruption. The transition from external risk to manufactured risk in modern society is causing a crisis of responsibility, which implies a change in the correlations between risk, responsibility and decisions. From this crisis emerges an “organized irresponsibility”: it increases the diversity of risks created by man, by which people and institutions are naturalistically blamed, and causes extreme deviations, as the expansion of Criminal Law. This paper deeply analyzes models of a new legal technology, possibly suitable for dealing with corruption, but at the same time attempts to depart from traditional paradigms of Criminal Law, towards a merging of Criminal Law and Administrative Law. The adopted nomenclature of Intervention Law is reinforced by a prospective exercise of trying to achieve a legal model of law aimed at intervening to deal with the problems of corruption, listing and analyzing what would be the desirable characteristics of an Anti-Corruption Intervention Law.