The Interaction and Connection between Criminal Law and Administrative Law in Corporate Compliance Legal Practice

Abstract

Corporate criminal conduct often exhibits dual illegality, whereby both administrative and criminal laws perform distinct yet complementary roles within the legal practice of corporate compliance. Specifically, criminal law serves regulatory and guarantee functions in corporate compliance, it provides substantive grounds for exculpation and mitigation of penalties, and fulfills preventive, deterrent, and supervisory effects against corporate crime. Conversely, administrative law functions as a normative guide and provides the legal basis for assessing the necessity of compliance as well as benchmarks for compliance evaluation. It thereby takes part in preventive, incentivizing, and punitive effects with respect to unlawful corporate behavior. In summary, the functional relationship between the two laws reveals a distinction between “prepositive law” and “guarantee law,” as well as between specificity and generality. In practice, administrative law tends to be more direct and moderate in its operation compared to criminal law. The establishment of a robust corporate compliance system requires the synergistic interaction and functional complementarity of both criminal and administrative law. Substantively, the two laws should jointly stipulate corporate compliance as a statutory ground, unify the compliance standards of administrative and criminal law. Procedurally, a full-chain governance model—encompassing prevention, process control, and accountability—should be adopted to construct a bidirectional coordination mechanism between administrative and criminal enforcement.