Corporate non-prosecution agreements as transnational human problems: transnational law and the study of domestic criminal justice reforms in a globalised world

ABSTRACT Nowadays, cases involving questions of corporate (ir)responsibility are largely resolved through negotiated settlements. A controversial development in this context is the cross-border rise of procedures akin to US non- and deferred prosecution agreements which allow prosecutors to agree with corporations not to prosecute serious economic crimes. The article uses this example to discuss the relevance of transnational law as an analytical framework for studying domestic criminal justice reforms in a globalised world. It revisits one of the central, albeit less noticed, themes of Philip C Jessup’s seminal 1956 Storrs Lectures on Transnational Law – transnational human problems – and identifies its descriptive and evaluative-critical benefits. The article then investigates to what extent these benefits are reflected in today’s two main theories of transnational law in criminal justice, ultimately finding that Transnational Legal Ordering of Criminal Justice provides a more suitable analytical framework than Transnational Criminal Law in this context.