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Academic Department

Business Law
Course Name: Business Law
Instructor: Patricia Nunley

This course is designed to provide students with sufficient understanding to identify and manage legal and ethical issues in financial and commercial transactions. This type of understanding requires a knowledge of the operation of business organizations, the various provisions in the Uniform Commercial Code that govern commercial transactions, federal securities regulations, and various other pertinent laws. Accordingly, students are introduced to the fundamental laws governing financial and commercial transactions, incorporating aspects of corporate governance, social responsibility, and ethical principles in business decisionmaking. Particular emphasis is given to the impact of the laws, like Sarbanes-Oxley, governing business transactions that present the greatest risks of legal liability and ethical implications, as well as the rules that provide protection from legal liability and ethical violations, like the business judgment rule. These topics are then viewed in the context of real world application through the use of case studies, current event discussions, guest speakers, field studies, and various other projects in order for students to develop a framework with which to analyze various legal and ethical issues in financial and commercial transactions which they may encounter in the future.

Course Name: CYBERLAW
Instructor: Dr. Blake Lecrone

This course is designed to give students an overview of legal and societal issues that individuals and corporations face in the new world of cyberspace. The digital revolution has also roused ethical problems, and these are covered in the course under topics such as infringement of patent, copyright, and trademark laws, identity theft, invasion of privacy issues involving intrusion, e-mail defamation, data mining violations, breach of confidentiality agreements, theft of trade secrets, child and adult pornography, and methods to handle the differences in U.S. and international law.

Throughout the course these topics are thoroughly covered and ethical repercussions for individuals and corporations are explored. Court decisions, emerging new cyber law statutes and guest speakers also enhance the path to understanding the rapidly evolving internet.

Course Name: Selected Topics in Business Law
Instructor: Karin Waugh Zucker

Although this course addresses very specific aspects of Business Law, discussions of the business environment, the place of corporations in American Law, and the appropriate actions of agents raise social and ethical issues. In ethical discussions, we look back at Organizational Ethics to attempt to identify the root cause of ethical lapses and review decision-making models to see how different paths might have led to very different results.