Dissertation defence (Criminal Law): OTK Heikki Jaatinen

OTK Heikki Jaatinen defends the dissertation in Criminal Law titled “Boundaries of Corporate Criminal Responsibility” at the University of Turku on 19 September 2026 at 12.00 (University of Turku, Calonia, Cal 1 lecture hall, Caloniankuja 3, Turku).

Opponent: Professor Lindsay Farmer (University of Glasgow, Scotland)

Custos: Associate Professor Tatu Hyttinen, OTT (University of Turku)

Summary of the Doctoral Dissertation:

Between the apology and the courtroom: when should a company answer for harm?

“We take full responsibility.” After almost every accident or scandal involving a large company, some version of these words appears in public. As a moral gesture, it is welcome. But moral, legal and criminal responsibility are not the same. My doctoral research examines the ground between the apology and the courtroom: when, and why, should a company answer for harm in the language of criminal law?

Companies do not merely take risks for themselves. Through organised economic activity, they also create risks borne by employees, consumers, communities and the environment. Most remain harmless, but sometimes they accumulate into serious harm, and occasionally into crime. At its heart lies a deceptively simple question: what does it mean for an organisation to act with sufficient care?

This is difficult because an organisation does not think or feel. Only the people within it have intentions. Yet its structures—how work is planned, how information moves, and how decisions are made and reviewed—shape what those people do. Traditional criminal law assesses individual blame: intention or carelessness. In a large organisation, however, cause and effect are often tangled. Harm may develop through many small and disconnected choices before surfacing all at once. By the time failures of instruction or oversight become visible, it may be too late, while no single individual has clearly done wrong.

My central argument is that sufficient care is not a single act but a continuing process aimed at preventing risks from accumulating before harm occurs. It consists of planning, communication, supervision and assessment of what an organisation does and what may follow. It is a matter of practical choices, including how resources are divided between managing risks and pursuing speed, efficiency and profit.

The freedom to organise economic activity and create risk must be accompanied by a duty to manage that risk with sufficient care. This duty also extends to how an organisation learns from failure. Where serious harm arises from a company’s activities, it should be expected to account for how it identified and managed the relevant risks. A genuinely careful organisation should be able to show what it reasonably did to prevent them.

At bottom, this is a question of criminal law and legal theory. It requires us to reconsider blame, fault and causation in a world shaped by organisations. My analysis remains anchored in law, but tests its concepts against the sociology of risk, organisational theory and safety science. Drawing cautiously on these disciplines, I assess organisational care through observable features of how a company operates, rather than by pretending that it possesses a human “mind”. The question shifts from “who is guilty?” to “was the organisation sufficiently careful?”, while retaining the link to human conduct and the underlying offence. Finnish law is placed in dialogue with international debate.

Why does this matter beyond the courtroom? We ask criminal law to punish, deter and express what society will not accept, yet this is especially difficult with very large companies. My aim is to help courts, prosecutors, lawmakers and companies think more clearly about the limits of acceptable business risk: to recognise organisations that take genuine care, hold accountable those that do not, and identify who must bear responsibility when things go wrong.

Part of the answer lies in knowing where criminal law should stop. Some failures are better addressed through civil or administrative measures, while some risks are inherent in complex activities and cannot be eliminated. Used properly, criminal law can do more than react to damage: it can articulate the duties accompanying organised risk-creation and encourage the foresight needed to prevent harm, even if the extent to which punishment changes large organisations remains open.