Sepinwall, Amy

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities
Law
Philosophy
Political Science
Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration

Position

James G. Campbell, Jr. Assistant Professor, Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics, Wharton, University of Pennsylvania

Introduction

I am an assistant professor at Wharton (University of Pennsylvania) in the Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics. I received my B.A. with First Class Honours in Philosophy and English from McGill University, where I also earned a Masters degree in Bioethics. I graduated with a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy, with Distinction, from Georgetown. Following law school, I clerked for the Honorable Louis H. Pollak of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Prior to my appointment at Wharton, I was an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. My research calls for an expansion of the understandings of responsibility standardly advanced in law and ethics, and a deflation of the conception of the corporation pervading much legal and public discourse. More specifically, I have two research streams, the first looking at questions of responsibility for financial and corporate wrongdoing, and the second interrogating the notion of corporate constitutional rights. Articles emerging from the first research stream address questions about assigning responsibility for corporate crimes: When and why it is appropriate to prosecute and punish corporations, or the executives who work for them? And when is it appropriate to have innocent beneficiaries of a corporate or financial crime return the proceeds they earned from that crime (e.g., when and why might it be appropriate for those who innocently profited from the Madoff Ponzi scheme to return their "winnings"?). Articles emerging from the second stream seek to gain clarity on the kind of citizen the corporation is, for purposes of delineating the scope and strength of its constitutional rights. Prior work has addressed the criminalization of harm to the unborn, reparations for slavery, the responsibility of commanders for atrocities committed by their troops, and the responsibility of citizens for transgressions committed by their nation-state. My works-in-progress seek to articulate an over-arching theoretical framework that will serve as a complement to the traditional, individualist paradigm, and help us assign responsibility for collective wrongdoing.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 19

The Unemotional Corporation
(2014-03-21) Sepinwall, Amy J
Because corporations are not capable of experiencing emotions, we should stop thinking of them as persons. Corporations are monsters – not in the sense that they are hell-bent on evil but in the sense that they lack certain capacities that are the hallmarks of our humanity. In particular, and like most supernatural creatures populating both mythology and the movieplex, corporations lack the ability to appreciate what it might feel like to be the victim of a wrong and, not unrelatedly, the ability to feel bad when they do wrong. To put it in our folk terminology, the corporation lacks a heart.
Burdening "Substantial Burdens"
(2016-05-28) Sepinwall, Amy J
In Hobby Lobby v. Burwell, the Supreme Court held that religious believers could establish that their free exercise was substantially burdened just so long as they—or the corporation they had formed—believed that it was. This highly deferential stance paved the way for yet another challenge to the contraceptive mandate. In Zubik, religious organizations (ROs) contend that it is not just subsidization of contraception that can make an employer complicit in contraception use. Instead, even filling out a form registering one’s objection to the mandate can do so. The government has responded by vigorously arguing that filling out a form cannot reasonably be construed as a substantial burden. One can read the Court’s per curiam opinion as an implicit endorsement of the RO’s claim that the accommodation process substantially burdens their free exercise. Nonetheless, without a decision on the merits, it is not clear just why the ROs should prevail on the substantial burden question. Nor do the parties’ submissions provide the needed clarity as the arguments on each side are irredeemably flawed. Or so at any rate I argue here. I nonetheless believe that there is good reason for ROs to contest the accommodation process, as it requires that the ROs ratify contraceptive use, in contravention of their religious beliefs. On these grounds, I find that the existing process imposes a substantial burden on religious exercise. But I also take seriously the rationale behind the contraceptive mandate and I conclude by seeking to vindicate women’s rights to free contraception in ways that the ROs should find congenial.
Penn State and the Blame Game
(2012-01-07) Sepinwall, Amy J; Rosner, Scott
It has now been two months since scandal rolled into the Happy Valley, with the news that Jerry Sandusky has been charged with 52 counts of child molestation. Much is still uncertain and yet the university, the surrounding community, and the nation as a whole remains fixated on the question of responsibility. In particular, does Penn State bear responsibility for any of the alleged acts of abuse and, if so, on what grounds? If the institution does bear responsibility, ought we to transmit that responsibility to members of the Penn State community? To which members? And what measures should Penn State undertake in response? We address each of these questions in turn.
Punishing Penn State
(2012-07-30) Sepinwall, Amy J; Rosner, Scott
The NCAA has imposed upon Penn State’s football program a series of punitive sanctions some deem worse than the (so-called) death penalty. The sanctions respond to Penn State’s failure to report and prevent Jerry Sandusky’s sex abuse crimes. We believe that Penn State deserves to be sanctioned, and we agree with the corrective sanctions the NCAA has imposed. But we fear that at least some of the punitive sanctions Penn State has received may be inappropriate.
Guilty by Proxy: Expanding the Boundaries of Responsibility in the Face of Corporate Crime
(2012-01-01) Sepinwall, Amy J
The BP oil spill and financial crisis share in common more than just profound tragedy and massive clean-up costs. In both cases, governmental commissions have revealed widespread wrongdoing by individuals and the entities for which they work. The public has demanded justice, yet the law enforcement response in both cases has been underwhelming. In particular, no criminal indictments have been sought for any of the corporations responsible for the Macondo oil-rig explosion or for the Wall Street banks involved in the financial meltdown. This governmental restraint reflects a deep-seated ambivalence about corporate criminal liability. Though scholars have been debating the justifiability of prosecuting and punishing corporations since the doctrine’s inception just over 100 years ago, virtually no progress has been made by either side. Thus, we have devastating instances of corporate crime and no good justification for prosecuting and punishing corporations. The Article seeks to diagnose the reason for the widespread consternation about the doctrine of corporate criminal liability. It then advances a new theoretical foundation for the doctrine. More specifically, the Article seeks to justify corporate criminal liability by arguing not that the corporation deserves to be punished for its wrongdoing but instead that its members do. Thus the Article conceives of corporate criminal liability as a way of targeting the corporation’s officials, who are blameworthy just in virtue of their role within the corporation. The Article ends by identifying a series of corporate sanctions that reflect the rationale for corporate criminal liability advanced here.
The Challenges of Conscience in a World of Compromise
(2018-01-01) Sepinwall, Amy J
The process of crafting and passing legislation might be thought to be the locus of compromise par excellence.1 Yet, where the law that results impinges upon moral or religious belief or practice, the issue of compromise arises anew, in both senses of the word: Individuals who oppose the law on moral or religious grounds believe that their political obedeience will compromise them in a fundamental way. Their plea for an exemption from the objectionable legal requirement is, then, a bid for further compromise.2 Compromise in the first sense concerns an undercutting of the self, while compromise in the second sense involves a grant of concessions. Yet, unlike compromises that arise in the legislative process, or at least in some ideal version of it,3 the compromise involved in an exemption from a neutral law of general application involves neither an exchange of benefits nor the prospect of mutual benefit-two hallmarks of compromise in, say, political (and other) negotiations.4 There are several reasons to doubt the wisdom or fairness of the requested exemptions, then.
Responsibility, Repair and Redistribution in the Wake of the Financial Crisis
(2013-01-01) Sepinwall, Amy J
Who bears responsibility for the financial crisis? The list of possible culprits is unmanageably long and at times internally inconsistent, as it includes subprime mortgages and over-zealous mortgage originators; risk-happy investment bankers and the ineffectual ratings agents who rubber-stamped the bankers' exotic products; and neoconservatives hell-bent on deregulation along with liberal politicians cowering before entities they allowed to become too big to fail.1 Nonetheless the question of responsibility seems to demand an answer not only for purposes of arriving at lessons that might avert a future crisis but also for answering a second question that seems a natural corollary of the first—viz., who bears responsibility for funding the bailouts necessitated by the financial crisis? More specifically, who in the United States bears responsiblity for funding the bailouts undertaken by the U.S. government?
Faultless Guilt: Toward a Relationship-Based Account of Criminal Liability
(2017-01-01) Sepinwall, Amy J
There is in the criminal law perhaps no principle more canonical than the fault principle, which holds that one may be punished only where one is blameworthy, and one is blameworthy only where one is at fault. Courts, criminal law scholars, moral philosophers, and textbook authors all take the fault principle to be the foundational requirement for a just criminal law. Indeed, perceived threats to the fault principle in the midtwentieth century yielded no less an achievement than the drafting of the Model Penal Code, which had as its guiding purpose an effort to safeguard faultless conduct from criminal condemnation. Yet notwithstanding its pedigree and predominance, I believe that the fault principle is false: Fault is not in fact necessary for one to deserve blame and punishment. Instead, and as made plain by the broader account of guilt I shall articulate here, one can be blameworthy, and so deserve punishment, even if one committed no element of the crime, and merely because one bears a particular kind of relationship to the criminal. Just when and why relationships, rather than fault, ought to ground criminal liability is what I seek to elucidate here. To that end, the Article first interrogates the (very few) arguments made on behalf of the fault principle and finds these wanting. The Article then presents cases and examples that illustrate how it is that one could be blameworthy even though one is not at fault. Finally, the Article considers the criminal law implications for individuals who are blameworthy without fault, and it concludes that at least some of these individuals deserve prosecution and punishment. This conclusion should not only shift our thinking about the conceptual relationships between blame, fault, guilt, culpability, and criminal liability. It should also awaken us to salutary practical possibilities. For the Article’s account, we shall see, ultimately provides a way to prosecute individuals who are widely regarded as deserving criminal punishment (e.g., executives at banks responsible for the financial crisis) but whom the fault principle currently places outside of the criminal law’s reach.
Responsibility for Historical Injustices: Reconceiving the Case for Reparations
(2006-01-01) Sepinwall, Amy J
The twentieth century ended with the vindication of many of its most mistreated victims' cries for reparation.2 Holocaust survivors retrieved over $8 billion in assets frozen in bank accounts or looted by the Nazis;3 Japanese Americans interned during World War II received compensation from the U.S. government;4 Chile compensated descendants of Pinochet's victims;5 Japan redressed Korean "comfort women"; 6 and Canada paid damages to Aboriginals for forced assimilation of their children.7 Absent from the list was the longest suffering and most visible of groups seeking repair - African Americans.8
Defense of Others and Defensless "Others"
(2005-01-01) Sepinwall, Amy J
When the Unborn Victims of Violence Act (UVVA) was signed into law on April 1, 2004,1 the federal government dishonored nothing less pedigreed than its founding philosophy. The UVVA criminalizes harm to the fetus and sanctions such harm with the punishment that would have befallen the accused had the women carrying the fetus been the one to sustain the injuries instead.2 This Article argues that recent efforts at fetal protection, like the UVVA, defy and defile liberalism, the political theory underpinning this nation's constitution,3 and thereby conduce to the subordination of women. 4

Sepinwall, Amy

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