Business Law & Ethics

LAW1000 Business Law & Ethics

(Formerly Business Law)

Foundation Requirement

4 Credits

This course provides students, as future business managers and leaders, with broad exposure to important areas of business law and with an introduction to business ethics. Legal and business considerations often are closely related. Students need a good working knowledge of legal and ethical principles in order to succeed in the business world. Law can be used to create and capture value for business activities as well as to mitigate legal and business risks.

Course goal #1 is to enable students to identify when they face legal issues in their professional lives and understand how to find additional information and/or consult intelligently with an attorney about them. Goal #2 is for students to be able to manage a business and its legal environment effectively. This includes understanding the significance of various legal and ethical issues, knowing how to manage and resolve legal disputes, knowing how to effectively structure businesses and deals, learning how to use the law to their advantage, and perhaps even when and how to try to change existing law. Goal #3 is to consider the limitations of the law and the role of ethical business principles and practices in sound decision making. To these ends, students read and analyze legal and ethics materials, apply precedents to new situations, complete group and individual projects, and practice analyzing, thinking, speaking and writing in a logical manner.

Business Law furthers three out of four overall learning goals of the undergraduate program

Collaboration - group projects such as negotiating contracts or conducting risk analyses and developing recommendations Communication - writing-intensive course involving writing assignments (research papers, contracts, analyses) and extensive Socratic dialogue in class through law case method teaching Problem solving - continual application of precedent to analyze fact situations and identify the application of legal principles to resolve the legal dispute in question, as well as the use of law as a larger policy tool to address wider social issues and problems. This course also has learning objectives specific to law and ethics. By the end of the course, students should be able to:

Understand substantive legal rules as well as procedural rules, institutions, and mechanisms; Appreciate the complex relationship between law and ethics; Identify ethical issues commonly arising in business and personal situations and understand and employ an ethical framework to manage these issues; Evaluate the ongoing role of law as a means of channeling human behavior in an interdependent society; Use law as a tool for understanding and solving business and social problems; and Utilize legal reasoning and understand how to make and defend basic legal arguments by drawing upon a broad range of relevant sources of legal authority.

Prerequisites: None