Business LAW

Preface Our goal is to provide students with a textbook that is up to date and comprehensive in its coverage of

legal and regulatory issues—and organized to permit instructors to tailor the materials to their particular

approach. This book engages students by relating law to everyday events with which they are already

familiar (or with which they are familiarizing themselves in other business courses) and by its clear,

concise, and readable style. (An earlier business law text by authors Lieberman and Siedel was hailed “the

best written text in a very crowded field.”)

This textbook provides context and essential concepts across the entire range of legal issues with which

managers and business executives must grapple. The text provides the vocabulary and legal acumen

necessary for businesspeople to talk in an educated way to their customers, employees, suppliers,

government officials—and to their own lawyers.

Traditional publishers often create confusion among customers in the text selection process by offering a

huge array of publications. Once a text is selected, customers might still have to customize the text to meet

their needs. For example, publishers usually offer books that include either case summaries or excerpted

cases, but some instructors prefer to combine case summaries with a few excerpted cases so that students

can experience reading original material. Likewise, the manner in which most conventional texts

incorporate video is cumbersome because the videos are contained in a separate library, which makes

access more complicating for instructors and students.

This model eliminates the need for “families” of books (such as the ten Miller texts mentioned below) and

greatly simplifies text selection. Instructors have only to select between our Business Law and Legal

Environment volumes of the text and then click on the features they want (as opposed to trying to

compare the large number of texts and packages offered by other publishers). In addition to the features

inherent in any publication, this book offers these unique features:

• Cases are available in excerpted and summarized format, thus enabling instructors to easily “mix and

match” excerpted cases with case summaries.

• Links to forms and uniform laws are embedded in the text. For example, the chapters on contract law

incorporate discussion of various sections of the Uniform Commercial Code, which is available

at http://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/ucc.table.html.

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• Likewise, many sample legal forms are readily available online. For example, the chapter on

employment law refers to the type of terms commonly found in a standard employment agreement,

examples of which can be found athttp://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/employment-

employer/employment-employer-hiring/employment-employer-hiring-contract-samples.html.

• Every chapter contains overviews that include the organization and coverage, a list of key terms, chapter

summaries, and self-test questions in multiple-choice format (along with answers) that are followed by

additional problems with answers available in the Instructors’ Manual.

• In addition to standard supplementary materials offered by other texts, students have access to

electronic flash cards, proactive quizzes, and audio study guides.

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Chapter 1 Introduction to Law and Legal Systems

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

1. Distinguish different philosophies of law—schools of legal thought—and explain their

relevance.

2. Identify the various aims that a functioning legal system can serve.

3. Explain how politics and law are related.

4. Identify the sources of law and which laws have priority over other laws.

5. Understand some basic differences between the US legal system and other legal

systems.

Law has different meanings as well as different functions. Philosophers have considered issues of justice

and law for centuries, and several different approaches, or schools of legal thought, have emerged. In this

chapter, we will look at those different meanings and approaches and will consider how social and

political dynamics interact with the ideas that animate the various schools of legal thought. We will also

look at typical sources of “positive law” in the United States and how some of those sources have priority

over others, and we will set out some basic differences between the US legal system and other legal

systems.

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