"Concezione pubblica della giustizia" e regolazione penale dell'impresa

Italian criminal law of corporations has undergone in 2002 a large reform which poses serious problems as to its compatibility with principles of justice and economic democracy. Despite the "liberal" attitudes overtly voiced at the time of its inception, it contradicts one of the main features of a developed, not merely traditional, sort of liberalism, namely the awareness of the strict need to survey and check power (especially economic, financial and industrial power) in its tendency to be opaquely concentrated in few hands. First and foremost in any consideration of public justice should be the equality in the distribution of relevant knowledges. As criminologists well know, white collar crime thrives in the dark but darkness in turn makes legal business and institutions blind to illegality and criminality. Contemporary criminal law scholars can no more afford to neglect how the wider cultural, institutional and economic environments, which encompass the scope of their professional decisions, is apt to define also the "justice" thereof, especially when criminal law impinges on economic relations and therefore on the conditions (not rarely themselves worth a criminal law's protection) of an adequate knowledge distribution among stakeholders and common citizens.