Legal assistance in criminal globalized society: development of the responsability of legal entities in Senate Bill nº 236/2012

• Grant number: 15/17626-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: March 01, 2016
• End date: August 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Law - Public Law
• Principal Investigator: Sérgio Salomão Shecaira
• Grantee: Helena Costa Rossi
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Direito (FD). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

It can be seen in the context of a globalized world of postmodernity, the emergence of new conflicts (especially economic and environmental) and an unprecedented sense of insecurity arising from the global scope that, coupled with a decisive media cooperation, forms the called risk society. This perception encourages impulse towards expansion of criminal law, which leads to hypertrophy of the legal and penal system, to abandon their legitimizing bases, mainly based on their limited subsidiarity action. Such mentioned expansion lies in the realm of classic crimes (homicide, robbery and etc.), with the understanding that as the new crime cases (involving powerful corporative decision-making centers in order to overcome the state regulation to better adapt to market demands) the State must move away in order to intervene in this privatizing trend to regulation only in extreme cases (case of antitrust and prohibitive laws of monopoly), a situation that results in the denial of traditional democratic filters, disregard the social interest as a whole, and contempt for basic rights. Nowadays, however, due to new crises, as in 2008, and the occurrence of frauds in sequence, come questions about the self-regulation of the efficiency of global markets, and the Criminal Law shall also forward this scope, accountability highlighting criminal legal entities. It is observed then, the expansion of criminal law in two directions, ie, the most harmful traditional punishment of crimes of individual interests and new cases of crime, harmful to supra-individual interests. This trend is mirrored in the Senate Bill 236/2012 presenting advances in criminal law in both directions entailing primarily the study of their development context.