Course Type: Electives (choose 4 Courses) (Done via Tubeclasses or other universities for Credit)
Course Code: MBA607
Course Name: Business Law
Course Outline
One of the most interesting and important developments in social science since 1970 has been the "discovery" of a consistent economic logic underlying the great common law subjects of property, contract, tort and crime, the thousand-year-old bedrock of the English and American legal systems. This logic prevails in the information age. Property and contract provide the institutional scaffolding that makes free exchange in markets possible, while the liability systems of tort and crime appear to mimic market exchange in areas of human activity where free exchange itself, for well-defined reasons, is not possible. This course seeks to expose this underlying economic logic through the close investigation of a series of paradigmatic problems and examples in light of some simple but very powerful economic ideas. The course assumes no prior background in economics or law, and begins with an introduction to the basic concepts of property, exchange, efficiency and externality. On this foundation, specific topics in the law, including property, tort and crime, eminent domain, intellectual property and criminal procedure, are considered. Each group of lectures will elaborate on a different concrete problem or example to suggest the range of legal issues and questions to which economic reasoning can be productively applied. The ideas and modes of analysis developed in the course are not difficult or mysterious, but the questions of interpretation and policy that they raise about a subject that affects everyone are challenging and provocative.
