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.