Business Law: Even Santa has a Clause

What you'll learn

Distinguish different philosophies of law—schools of legal thought—and explain their relevance.
Identify the various aims that a functioning legal system can serve.
Explain how politics and law are related.
Identify the sources of law and which laws have priority over other laws.
Understand some basic differences between the US legal system and other legal systems.
Define ethics and explain the importance of good ethics for business people and business organizations.
Understand the principal philosophies of ethics, including utilitarianism, duty-based ethics, and virtue ethics.
Distinguish between the ethical merits of various choices by using an ethical decision model.
Explain the difference between shareholder and stakeholder models of ethical corporate governance.
Explain why it is difficult to establish and maintain an ethical corporate culture in a business organization.
Describe the two different court systems in the United States, and explain why some cases can be filed in either court system.
Explain the importance of subject matter jurisdiction and personal jurisdiction and know the difference between the two.

Requirements

Come with an open mind.

Description

To a great extent, business activity across the world is carried on within a capitalist, market-based system. With regard to such a system, law provides and maintains an essential framework within which such business activity can take place, and without which it could not operate.

In maintaining this framework, law establishes the rules and procedures for what is to be considered legitimate business activity and, as a corollary, what is not legitimate. It is essential, therefore, for the businessperson to be aware of the nature of the legal framework within which they have to operate.

Even if they employ legal experts to deal with their legal problems, they will still need to be sufficiently knowledgeable to be able to recognize when to refer matters to those experts. It is the intention of this course to provide business students with an understanding of the most important aspects of law as they impinge on various aspects of business activity. One of the most obvious and most central characteristics of all societies is that they must possess some degree of order, in order to permit their members to interact over a sustained period of time.

Different societies, however, have different forms of order. Some societies are highly regimented with strictly enforced social rules, whereas others continue to function in what outsiders might consider a very unstructured manner, with apparently few strict rules being enforced. In this course we will focus on US business law.

Who this course is for:

Anyone interested in business.
Anyone interested in law.
Anyone interested in business law.