This article explores the ideological dimensions of the current debate over the constitutional status of the regulatory offence. It contends that what animates this debate is an underlying conflict between competing liberal ideologies in which an emergent libertarian classical liberalism is increasingly undermining the dominance within legal discourse of a more statist-oriented pluralist liberalism. Moreover, it suggests that it is a debate which is closely connected to a more far-reaching ideological controversy over the future of the regulatory state. The article concludes by arguing that, within this debate, fundamental questions about the nature of corporate power and legal status are obscured, questions that a critical theory of the regulatory offence must confront