The passage into law of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (ECCTA 2023) marks the first time that Parliament has made significant changes to the common law principles of corporate criminal liability. First, for fault-based crimes, the ECCTA 2023 extends the common law practice of identifying a company with the criminal acts of its directors. By virtue of section 196 of the Act, a company may now also be identified with fault-based criminal acts engaged in by its ‘senior managers’ below directorial level. Secondly, the ECCTA 2023 creates a new corporate offence of failing to prevent fraud, although this may be committed only by so-called ‘large organisations’. I argue that the first of these reforms was not properly thought through, and that it should in any event have been made largely redundant by giving wider scope to the second of these reforms. An opportunity was missed in the ECCTA 2023 to make a failure-to-prevent serious crime a more generally applicable principle of corporate criminal liability.

I consider the ways in which the courts use a variety of existing powers to determine the scope of criminal offences, on a prospective basis, through declarations as to the limits or extent of the law. I argue that the courts should be emboldened to build on these powers through greater openness to the circumstances in which declarations may be issued. In particular, courts should be more open to actions for declarations as to the scope of criminal offences brought by a broader range of third parties, such as third sector organisations devoted to exposing wrongdoing.

The distinctions that may be drawn between self-defence, necessity and duress are interesting as a matter of theory, but may also be important in practice. In some jurisdictions, for example, duress and necessity are no defence to murder whereas self-defence is a defence available in principle to all crimes. In such jurisdictions, in homicide cases, the point at which one reaches the boundaries of self-defence and enters upon the terrain of necessity may thus be of crucial significance. Drawing on Suzanne Uniacke’s theory of self-defence, I would like to suggest that each defence can be distinguished by a different key issue. In necessity cases, the key issue is the moral imperative to act: what matters is whether in the circumstances it was morally imperative to act, even if this might involve the commission of wrongdoing, in order to negate or avoid some other evil. In duress cases, the key issue is the personal sacrifice D is being asked to make: should D be expected to make the personal sacrifice involved in refusing to give in to a coercive threat, rather than avoid implementation of the coercive threat by doing wrong? In self-defence cases, the key issue is D’s legal permission to act: where V unjustly represented a threat to D (normally, although not exclusively, through his—V’s—conduct), the question is whether necessary and proportionate steps were taken by D to negate or avoid the threat. For, D has a legal permission to take necessary and proportionate steps to negate or avoid an unjust threat, even if (exceptionally) these involve the use of lethal force. So baldly stated, the differences between the defences may seem obvious. Few common law jurisdictions, and few commentators, however, have appreciated the full significance of the differences, as we shall shortly see.

In October 2010, the UK Parliament brought into effect law that replaced the partial defence to murder of provocation with a new partial defence of “loss of control”, applicable to England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Although it retained some key features of its controversial predecessor, the new partial defence was in part designed better to address the gendered contexts within which a large number of homicides are committed. In examining the impact of the reforms, we will focus on long-held concerns about the treatment of sexual infidelity as a trigger for loss of control in murder cases. The article undertakes an analysis of English case law to evaluate the way in which sexual infidelity-related evidence has influenced perceptions of a homicide defendant's culpability, for the purposes of sentencing, both before and after the implementation of reform. The analysis reveals that, in sentencing offenders post reform, the higher courts have failed to follow the spirit of the reforms respecting the substantive law by effecting a corresponding change in sentencing practice.