Business Rights Watch

The history of white-collar crime is a history dominated by prosecutorial misconduct.

Conrad Black’s book on his legal ordeal, A Matter of Principle, has now been published (it can be ordered from Amazon here) and The New Criterion’s February issue has a review of it, “The persection of Lord Black,” by Andrew C. McCarthy.

In his State of the Union address, on January 24, President Obama said: "I’m asking my Attorney General to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorney general [sic] to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners, and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.”

Leftists often insist—and quite rightly—that it is foolish for America to try to impose its political system on countries with fundamentally different cultures. But will they speak out against the American government’s increasing attempts to impose our legal system on countries with fundamentally different cultures? Michael Volkov (background here) points out at his blog “Corruption, Crime & Compliance” just how far the U.S. invasion has gone.

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds has been looking back to the early days of his blog, 10 years ago, and this look back struck me as a particularly fruitful: How about compensation for defense expenditures when a person is found not guilty?

Quoth Reynolds on January 5, 2002: “A lot of people like my idea of applying "loser pays" to the government -- though one lawyer who represents governments says it should work both ways.

You got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

On Tuesday, November 22, Merck announced that it had reached a half-billion-dollar agreement with numerous state governments and with the federal government to settle civil charges that the company had illegally promoted Vioxx for off-label uses and that it had misrepresented the drug's risks.

 Law professor Doug Berman, who runs the “Sentencing Law and Policy” blog, has just highlighted another case that seems to point up the Justice Department’s “submit or die” policy. 

Every day, it seems, another “insider-trading” defendant is hauled before the courts or sentenced to prison. In fact, many of these “insider traders” are not insiders at all. They are merely people who have acquired information from insiders.

Yet the business community either clucks its approval of their being sent to prison for years, or it says nothing.