Document Type
Working Paper
Publication Date
2-24-2011
Keywords
criminal law, business law, commercial law, banking law, legal ethics, international law
Abstract
In recent years, various “gatekeeping initiatives” have been introduced through inter-governmental standard-setting organizations, such as the Financial Action Task Force, as well as through federal legislation in the United States, which seek to apply the mandatory customer due diligence, record keeping, and suspicious activity reporting obligations contained in the existing anti-money laundering regime to lawyers when they conduct certain commercial transactions on behalf of their clients. The organized bar has argued against such attempts to regulate it, in part, due to the lack of empirical data showing that, as a threshold matter, lawyers unwittingly aid money laundering in a significant number of cases. Through the analysis of a sample of money laundering cases from the Second Circuit, this Article empirically examines whether lawyers are involved in a significant number of transactions that serve to launder elicit funds, and it considers the implications of the study on whether lawyers are in a position to serve as gate-keepers against money-laundering.
Disciplines
Banking and Finance Law | Commercial Law | Criminal Law | International Law | Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility
Digital Commons Citation
Cummings, Lawton P. and Stepnowsky, Paul T., "My Brother's Keeper: An Empirical Study of Attorney Facilitation of Money-Laundering through Commercial Transactions" (2011). Faculty Scholarship. 971.
https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/fac_pubs/971
Included in
Banking and Finance Law Commons, Commercial Law Commons, Criminal Law Commons, International Law Commons, Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons