 But many acts of corruption are not unlawful. Bribery, a paradigm of corruption, is a case in point. Prior to 1977 it was not unlawful for US companies to offer bribes to secure foreign contracts; indeed, elsewhere such bribery was not unlawful until much  later.[3]  So corruption is not necessarily unlawful. This is because corruption is not at bottom simply a matter of law; rather it is fundamentally a matter of morality.