Catholic Dioceses, Legal Systems, and Corporate Accountability

This book explores how different legal systems handle a particularly difficult type of corporate wrongdoing: Catholic dioceses ’ responsibility for child sexual abuse.
Usually, when people think about corporate wrongdoing, they think about tax fraud, insider trading, and similar ’ white-collar ’ crime. As corporations, dioceses ’ responsibility for child sexual abuse exists separately from that of individual perpetrators, and this corporate responsibility is the focus of this book.
Through an analysis of cases involving dioceses that have significant documented histories of priests abusing children, this book illustrates how criminal law, canon law, tort law, bankruptcy law and an Australian Royal Commission have responded (or why they have not). The cases involve the Diocese of Ballarat, in Victoria, Australia, and the Diocese of Gallup, in northern Arizona and New Mexico, in the United States. Each diocese faced similar claims in a diverse field of legal systems, so very different legal systems were handling, in essence, the same cases in dissimilar contexts.
Employing a novel interdisciplinary approach, the book traces the theories, purposes, doctrines, procedures, and logistics of engaging with these different legal systems - evaluating what they can and cannot do. Revitalising theories of responsive law, the book demonstrates that it is possible for legal systems to better hold not just Catholic dioceses, but corporations more generally, to account for wrongdoing, but we may need to rethink how those systems are structured.

Meredith Edelman is Senior Lecturer in Law at Monash Business School, Australia.