With Corporate Crime and Punishment. The Politics of Negotiated Justice in Global Markets, Cornelia Woll brings to our attention a critical shift in global markets, namely the rise of negotiated settlements to prosecute corporate misconduct such as fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, or environmental damage. Negotiated settlements are pre-trial deals in which the defendant agrees on a punishment without the formal establishment of guilt. From the early 2000s, they have gained relevance in the prosecution of corporate crimes in the United States. A decade on, the Department of Justice (DoJ) has begun applying them extraterritorially to prosecute foreign firms. One of the most spectacular cases is the DoJ’s decade-long fight against US tax evasion in Switzerland. It profoundly damaged the Swiss banking sector, effectively abolishing the country’s banking secrecy. It is this use of negotiated settlements beyond US borders that Woll dissects in her book with precision and an unfailing sense for the underlying (geo)politics.

She argues that the United States’ ability to use its laws extraterritorially is dependent on flexible legal tools and market power. Based on an impressively extensive review of international law, international relations, and international political economy scholarship as well as the historical tracing of the rise of negotiated justice, Woll establishes its ambivalent implications:

On the upside, negotiated justice increases the accountability of international corporations. Even large firms “are no longer above the law in global markets” (p. xii). However, it is not just the United States’ global fight against corporate crime that has led to this welcome development. Governments whose companies have been targeted by the DoJ adjust their own legal systems too. They thereby aim to regain jurisdictional sovereignty and to punish corporate wrongdoing more effectively. Woll covers the varying extent of the resulting judicial reforms in brief case studies.

On the downside, the United States’ fight against corporate crime hits non-US firms harder than their American competitors. The author presents evidence that foreign businesses have an almost 15% higher chance of being fined and incur higher charges (p. 52). Potential explanations for this “home bias” include foreign firms’ unfamiliarity with the US legal system, leading to worse negotiation outcomes. Furthermore, prosecutors may be driven by the ambition to pick complicated cross-border criminal cases. While these explanations hold some water, the author convincingly argues that the ultimate reason behind the “home bias” is political: expanding US law across borders protects American interests via global markets. It is a tool for outright economic lawfare. Behind the “façade of being tough on corporate crime” (p.37), successive US governments—especially Democrat-led ones—have waged economic lawfare not only against its most notorious opponents such as Russia, China, and Iran, but also against its closest allies, including Britain, France, Germany, and Japan. In this regard, the book also speaks to the current moment of President Trump’s tariffs and other forms of economic aggression. It becomes evident, once more, that current geopolitical developments are not necessarily an aberration, but a blunt culmination of past policies.

The book’s empirical assessments are embedded into a conceptual analysis that draws on critical legal scholarship, specifically on the notion of legal regimes. The framework effectively captures how the tension between domestic jurisdiction and international trade and finance leads to a collision of normative orders. It also problematizes that negotiated settlements preserve “a hierarchical system of domination […], where economic resources affect how justice will be done” (p. 34). With this analytical setup, Woll allows her book to span the geopolitical and the normative implications of the rise of negotiated corporate justice globally. In doing so, Corporate Crime and Punishment provides an insightful account of how US domination is rooted in domestic legal features and projected into the international sphere via market power and the control of critical economic infrastructures.

However, taking the analytical perspective of the hegemon, the book runs the risk of portraying US American power as unconstrained. Woll writes: “Without multilateral agreements or diplomatic support, and in some cases even without bilateral consensus on what is right or wrong, the US Department of Justice has turned into the policemen [sic!] of the global economy” (p. 80). When it comes to economic lawfare, Woll contends, even China has not much to counter (pp. 79–80).

While there is little doubt that the United States is the most powerful player in the game of extraterritorial jurisdiction, there are at least two sources of constraint to that power. The first is the question of the response or retaliation by other states, the second is the global reach of English law via the offshore system. It is important to acknowledge these constraints as power is a relational phenomenon and is, empirically speaking, rarely absolute.

Regarding retaliation, Woll claims: “legal challenges are different from other forms of economic aggression. Rather than triggering retaliation, they bring with them the collision of normative orders” (p. 10). While her argument about the collision of normative orders is convincing, the question remains whether this logically and empirically excludes retaliation. Indeed, the author herself states that China’s move to pass legislation that can be applied outside its borders came in response to US legal challenges to Chinese technology firms (p. 80). Similarly, the European Union’s competition and regulatory policies explicitly target US Big Tech firms. While these measures might not be in the realm of corporate prosecution proper, they do constitute a retaliation to US American lawfare in that space. The shift of the EU’s response from corporate criminal law to competition policy simply lies in its responsibilities. While member states are in charge for corporate prosecution, the European Commission has strong powers in the field of competition policy. Given that the EU’s regulatory demands come at significant costs to US Big Tech, they do constrain US American global judicial power. In fact, they have reached such a level that Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg evoked in an interview in January 2025 with Joe Rogan, the host of a controversial podcast, the need of state protection against the European measures. Cornelia Woll convincingly shows that America’s corporate criminal law has a long arm. Yet, it might not act quite as unconstrained by other states as her account implies.

Concerning the offshore system, it comes as a genuine surprise that Corporate Crime and Punishment largely misses its importance. Woll references offshore finance several times throughout the book, not least because most of the criminal cases she discusses have an important offshore component. From Switzerland’s tax havenry to the City of London’s LIBOR scandal and Brazil’s Lava Jato corruption scheme, it has been the legal arbitrage between US laws and the laws in offshore financial centers that enabled these crimes. Importantly, in the offshore world, the line between legally combining different jurisdictions for optimization (e.g. of tax payments or profits), or doing so by maneuvering within the grey areas or for hiding a crime as in Woll’s exemplary cases, is blurry as demonstrated by Katharina Pistor’s (2020) The Code of Capital and Kimberly Hoang’s (2022) Spiderweb Capitalism. It is therefore astonishing that Woll’s account does not address the legal nature of the offshore system.

This system stretches from the City of London – the system’s epicenter and largest financial hub – to Caribbean financial centers in the West and Hong Kong in the East. Most of the system’s 29 jurisdictions use English law for their financial services, and the involved parties often choose London courts for settling claims. It is for this reason that Palan (2015) calls the offshore system “The Second British Empire” in a contribution to Legacies of Empire, which he co-edited with Sandra Halperin. Britain’s offshore empire may be invisible, but it is by no means negligible. For instance, there are more US dollars circulating in the world economy that have been created offshore, i.e., under English law, than in the United States under US laws, as I show in Outsourcing Empire. Indeed, economic actors, particularly from the Global South, work via offshore financial centers to avoid the possibility of US litigation (see Binder Offshore Finance and State Power (2023). Britain, too, exercises extraterritorial jurisdiction by combining flexible legal tools with market power. Furthermore, it offers the opportunity to escape US jurisdiction. This is precisely the reason why offshore finance is so attractive to international investors and corporate crooks alike. Put differently, keeping Britain’s normative order separate from that of the United States is the City of London’s raison d’être. It follows logically that Britain, as Woll herself demonstrates in a case study, largely resisted an “Americanization” of its corporate criminal law (p. 120).

Despite these omissions, Corporate Crime and Punishment are an engagingly written, highly insightful, and balanced account of the benefits and downsides of US extraterritorial jurisdictional power. It explains how US hegemony works from the vantage point of negotiated justice. It also deliberates the related normative costs: antagonizing allies internationally and challenging the normative order at home because, as Woll writes, “where innocence comes with a price tag, negotiated justice can turn into a democratic challenge” (p. 133). And here we are.