The previously separate forces of administrative regulation and criminal enforcement have now converged, fundamentally altering the relationship between business and government. Today’s general counsel confronts an expanding maze of regulation that makes doing business more complicated and expensive, while public calls for ever more strict criminal enforcement threaten to turn morally neutral conduct into felonies.
Changes in the written law and, perhaps more importantly, an evolution in expectations about how and when the law will be applied have caused this convergence. Though more prevalent in explicitly regulated industries, such as financial services, pharmaceuticals and medical devices, energy and telecommunications, it is increasingly true also in every nook and cranny of commercial life, both in the United States and abroad, that regulation and criminal enforcement have merged into an unbroken continuum, with consequences that both government and business would do well to recognize.
