Circumscribing the “Prosecutor’s Ticket to Tag the Elite” – A Critique of the Responsible Corporate Officer Doctrine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The recent oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and ensuing questions of\naccountability have brought a controversial legal tool to the forefront, the “responsible\ncorporate officer doctrine.” This doctrine allows courts to hold individuals who\nexercise control over business policies or activities personally liable for failing to\nprevent statutory offenses by subordinates, even if they themselves were not aware of\nany wrongdoing.\nFor corporate officials, the RCO doctrine is dangerous because of its ability to\nsidestep the usual requirements that apply to holding corporate agents responsible.\nMoreover, from their viewpoint, the doctrine is troubling in that it extends statutory\nduties of legal entities to their “responsible corporate officers” as an additional class\nof defendants. Examined from a broader perspective, the RCO doctrine may also result\nin additional costs, contribute to overdeterrence, and undermine the notion of limited\nliability.\nThis Article explains how the RCO doctrine runs contrary to established tort,\ncriminal, and corporate law principles and why it represents an unwarranted\naugmentation of corporate agents’ duties. It then proceeds to explain that current\njustifications of the doctrine are not convincing and explores the doctrine’s negative\neffects. Finally, the Article advances the idea of a “cautious approach” to applying the\nRCO doctrine, arguing that legislatures and courts should reduce the RCO doctrine to rare and clearly delineated instances of statutory liability for intentional or knowing\nmisconduct.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".