Criminal Sanctions

Answer choices

1. A

   Bad Match14% picked this

   to explain why corporations might find it advantageous to appoint an

   We were looking for something like, "to give a reason why it would be bad to make criminal sanctions target individuals, rather than the overall corporation", so this doesn't seem to reinforce the ideas we want. They stole this language from the sentence after the "complex hierarchies" sentence. But that sentence begins, "Another problem ...", indicating that the scapegoat sentence is problem #2. The complex hierarchies were problem #1. They're both problems with the "misguided" approach from the first sentence of the last paragraph.

   14%
2. B

   Opposite8% picked this

   to highlight the reasons why individuals are, according to critics of corporate criminal liability, more

   This answer says the sentence was supposed to be highlighting the point of view that "individuals should be prosecuted, since they're more responsive to deterrence" (a paragraph 3 idea). But the author's sentence was undermining that point of view, not helping it. The author uses buried responsibility to argue AGAINST individual prosecution. The claim being attributed here belongs to the critics' position in paragraph 3, not to what the author is doing with this specific point. The sentence in question is a counter-argument, not a summary of the critics' reasons.

   8%
3. C

   Out of Scope5% picked this

   to underscore the extent to which corporate criminal liability penalizes certain

   The author never talks about how punishing individuals would be unfair. He simply thinks that we might not be able to locate blame with specific individuals or that the corporation will just bribe someone to be a scapegoat (thus we won't be able to prosecute a corporation for its wrongdoing).

   5%
4. D

   Correct72% picked this

   to indicate that the proposal that individuals be subject to criminal liability for corporate wrongdoing is

   Why this is right

   We might not know what the word "impracticable", but does it sound positive or negative? It sounds like impractical, which is negative. So this answer would be saying the purpose of our author's complex hierarchy line was to indicate that "the proposal [to prosecute individuals] is something-negative." That seems appealing. After all, we were looking for something like, "to give a reason why it would be bad to make criminal sanctions target individuals, rather than the overall corporation". The meaning of impracticable is very very close to that of impractical. It just means "hard/impossible to put into practice". The misguided approach the author is talking about is "trying to prosecute individuals within corporations for wrongdoing, not the corporation itself." The author is like, "Psssh. Good luck! How are you going to figure out which specific individuals are responsible for a corporation's wrongdoing? Don't you know that corporations will bury responsibility within complex hierarchies? That makes it impracticable to prosecute specific individuals."

   Skill tested: Local Purpose · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.

   72%
5. E

   Out of Scope1% picked this

   to suggest that critics of criminal corporate liability have misunderstood the legal definition

   We were looking for something like, "to give a reason why it would be bad to make criminal sanctions target individuals, rather than the overall corporation". This whole misunderstood the legal definition of criminal liability comes out of left field.

   1%