This paper focuses on the passage and enforcement of laws regulating the corporate sector, specifying patterns which seem to emerge from this literature in the major English speaking democracies.The creation of regulatory laws, the typical resistance by the industry and the state, and the crucial role of crises in the successful passage of laws are examined first. The patterns which law enforcement follows, and the key role of the regulatory agency in shaping these, are delineated next. The theoretical implications of these empirically based generalizations are then set out.The author argues that neither the pluralist nor the mainstream Marxist analyses adequately explain the very real progress that has occurred over the past 400 years in containing corporate crime, because it has happened largely in spite of rather than because of laws and regulatory activity. Real reform resulted because ongoing struggles forged a change at the ideological level, and this in turn led to improvements at the level of production. By raising the price of legitimacy for corporations in a particular nation‐state, prolaterian groups and their allies can create the conditions for change. Law and regulatory agencies have been of secondary importance, it is argued, in the struggle to restrain the predatory behavior of the corporate secto