尽管根据我国现行《刑法》，单位（法人）仅可以成为约146个具体罪名的犯罪主体，大体上却涵盖了可以对个人生命、健康及社会政治、经济秩序产生重大影响的多数公害与经济犯罪。社会高速发展，带来了法人组织规模的愈发庞大以及内部管理机制的过度复杂。作为社会活动的积极参与者与多数评判标准下最为成功的个体，法人同时为21世纪带来了前所未有的风险规模。由于以自然人为一元主体的犯罪理论无法应对日益复杂的法人犯罪现状；存在论上自然人与法人的差别亦要求对法人犯罪与自然人犯罪进行教义构建上的区分，我国迫切需要构建起法人刑事责任相关理论体系。法人组织存在的唯一意义与最为突出的特点，在于以一定管理机制为核心，令本无关联的自然人为实现特定目的而在其职责范围内，获取信息、互动合作、实施行动。现有理论当中，替代责任模式在就危害行为与犯罪相关信息对于法人是否具有可归属性的判断上具有优势；本体责任模式在组织内部管理机制与危害结果间因果关系的认定上较为有利。以法人犯罪肯定说为逻辑起点，何以对上述两种模式进行统合、协调，以形成有效解决我国法人犯罪困境的责任追究策略，具有较为显著的学术意义。法人犯罪问题的核心在于归责，即针对可以归属于法人组织的危害行为所引起的法律后果而言，应当如何进行判断、确认、追究或是免除的相关活动。受制于个人责任原则，并非所有与法人不良管理机制具有事实上因果关系的危害结果均应令法人承担法律后果。以法人特定义务的违反为前提，当其所采用管理机制与行业相同、规模相似、架构相仿的法人进行对比时显示出不合理的低效率性时，代表了其对结果回避义务的违反，存在组织过失，应被客观归责。报应以法人的主观责任为前提，法人组织投入于信息收集、分享、分析相关管理机制的成本，与其超越个体代理人对构成要件要素进行认识的“有效范围”大小成正比。合理采用推定方法，能够证明法人组织对于危害结果的主观心理状态。以替代责任模式当中的上级责任原理对个体代理人所实施之行为与掌握的信息进行“是否具有可归属性”的判断；危害结果的客观归属、法人主观责任以及处罚阻却事由有无的考察，均需紧密围绕着法人所采用管理机制展开。这不仅有益于解决不同形态结构法人犯罪为司法实践带来的艰巨挑战，也能够实现追究法人刑事责任的意义，较好地协调刑罚所具备的威慑、报应，以及矫治功能，令法人犯罪惩治体系得以实现预防法人犯罪的最终目的。
Corporate crimes occur all too often, causing serious harm to individuals, as well as to the economies of countries adversely impacted by crimes such as fraud. Few would disagree that malfeasance committed within corporations can inflict outsized harms on the public; that it occurs within complex, diverse, and often opaque institutional contexts; and, therefore, to guard against these harms, criminal laws and regulations impose duties on corporations and those who work for them to avoid a range of harmful activities. Most who have thought about this problem would concede that the role of corporate management mechanism is a central point of intervention for law: a locus to which wrongdoing often can be traced and where deterrent messages can achieve leverage given that managers wield disproportionate power within firms. Chinese corporate law, regimes of securities regulation, and many other systems of regulation designed with the corporation in mind proceed from these premises. This point about directing incentives towards corporate management mechanism is only more important, while also trickier to get right, when managers of corporations do not personally commit the relevant delicts – a scenario that has been repeating in corporations. However, modern corporate criminal law owes its origin and design more to crude borrowing from individual criminal and civil law than to any coherent assessment of the objectives of corporate criminal law and of how those objectives might be attamed. As a result, corporate criminal liability is in such a weak and undeveloped state that many commentators urge that corporate criminal sanctions be displaced by civil monetary penalties, injunctions and negotiation and guidance, backed up when necessary by individual criminal sanctions. The purpose of this Article is to review critically the answers offered by those who recommend the decriminalization of corporate offenses. This Article argues that a broader view of the goals of corporate criminal law should be adopted, and that reconstruction, not abolition, of corporate criminal law is needed to attain those goals. No attempt is made to detail what a full-scale reconstruction would involve; rather, the initial step is taken of examining whether such an effort is warranted.
