Symposium and Inaugural lecture of Prof. Sharon Oded

The event was attended by more than 150 guests, members of the academic community, practitioners, and representatives from both the private sector (including financial institutions and leading multinational corporations), and the public sector (including policymakers and representatives from regulatory authorities and NGOs). The symposium was chaired by Prof. dr. Michael Faure, General Director of the Rotterdam Institute of Law and Economics (RILE), Erasmus School of Law, and opened with a speech by the Dean of the Erasmus School of Law, Prof. mr. dr. Suzan Stoter.

The keynote speaker at the Symposium was Prof. Dan Arialy. Arialy, Professor of Behavioural Economics at MIT & Duke Universities and recognised in 2013 by Bloomberg as one of top 50 most influential thinkers, delivered a talk based on his best-seller The Honest Truth About Dishonesty. He discussed the forces that influence our behaviour and presented conclusions from a wide range of experiments dealing with the mystery of why, despite our best intentions, we often fail to act in our own best interest. This was followed by a plenary discussion led by Wijnand Nuijts, Manager Supervision of Governance, Culture and Organisational Behaviour at the Dutch Central Bank (DNB), in which practical conclusions were discussed concerning how to nurture the right corporate culture of compliance.

The second part of the symposium included lectures by Femke de Vries, Professor of Regulatory Enforcement, University of Groningen and Executive Board Member for the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM), on Financial Supervision and Corporate Culture, and Julio Bacio Terracino, Deputy Head Public Sector Integrity Division The organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), on Compliance and Integrity: Insights from the Public Sector.

The symposium was signed off by Prof. Sharon Oded's inaugural lecture on the "Intoxication of Force: When Enforcement Undermines Compliance". In his inaugural lecture, Prof. Oded raised the question of whether enforcement policies currently emerging in the U.S. and other jurisdictions are suitable to serve this purpose. The lecture was particularly concerned with the intoxication of force – that is, the very real situation where the main goal of the enforcement system is to sanctify harsh enforcement, rather than to encourage meaningful compliance. After critically analysing the path through which some recent enforcement policies are marching, Prof. Oded proposed that in addition to generating an adequate level of deterrence, raising the legitimacy of white-collar crime law, as well as the legitimacy of its enforcement, would produce better outcomes for society than applying overly zealous, harsh and coercive enforcement. 

Further details on the event are available here.