Business Law

Skills – 1 unit - This course will introduce students to the practice of conscious lawyering, including concepts in professional and personal identity, self-awareness, focus, emotional intelligence, cultural and personal values, mindfulness, meditation, and mind-body connection. This course will help train students to be mindful and aware while engaging in the practice of law including litigation, negotiations, transactional deals, client management, and day-to-day work in a law practice.

Seminar – 2 units. As both an area of academic inquiry and legal practice, business law routinely undergoes rapid evolution and change. That dynamism has seen punctuated acceleration in recent years. Many of the fundamental precepts of business law have been critically interrogated, questioned, and litigated. This seminar seeks to expose students to these recent development in business law with a focus on modern issues in corporate law, securities, and antitrust.

Seminar – 3 units. The course will cover the fundamentals of the corporate governance theory, discussing the most important topics on a worldwide perspective focusing on the 2023 version of the “G20/OECD Principles of Corporate Governance”. We will discuss the challenges in the implementation of such principles depending on the characteristics of the region and other relevant factors. In this sense, students will assess some cases of countries where these difficulties are higher than others, as well as examples of good practices that have been implemented with success.

Seminar – 3 hours. An increasingly popular trend in legal scholarship is the use of quantitative data to inform legal theories and socio-political debates. Indeed, it is rare today to come across a law review article or Supreme Court opinion that does not reference or rely upon some analysis of data to make a legal argument. Therefore, being able to be a critical consumer of empirical legal analysis is a skill that every lawyer should have. In this class, you will learn to be *both* a critical consumer and producer of empirical legal scholarship.

Seminar – 3 hours. Climate change is redefining the business and investment community's business norms and transforming traditional corporate law paradigms. This highly interactive seminar will use case studies to explore the current intersection of business law and climate risk. We will discuss and debate the following questions:1) Do corporate boards have a fiduciary duty to oversee climate risk?

Lecture - Society’s expectations of companies are changing and companies are responding. Many companies go beyond compliance with the law to address environmental and social issues, from climate change to diversity. This new articulation of corporate purpose raises complex legal, ethical, and business questions. This class uses the case study method to examine this paradigm shift in the business and investment community. Each week we will analyze a particular company or business trend.

Lecture - 4 hours. This class is an introduction to the federal income taxation of business entities including corporations and partnerships. This course will examine the federal income tax relationship between corporations and their owners and will cover the transfer of funds into a corporation on formation and the re-transfer of money and property from the corporation to its shareholders.

Discussion – 3 hours. This course surveys approaches to privacy regulation around the globe, including a comparison of regulatory frameworks and different policy solutions. The course also introduces the major international privacy regulatory and enforcement institutions. Core lecturing will focus on the European General Data Protection Regulation and how it compares with US law.

Seminar - 2 hours. The business of professional sports has evolved significantly over the past decade, driven by both urban development trends, along with an explosion in technology, and social change. These forces, along with others, have dramatically influenced the economic shape and arc of professional sports teams, which in turn impacts all aspects of professional sports.

Discussion - 3 hours. The principal focus of the course is the federal antitrust laws, concentrating on basic substantive areas of the Sherman and Clayton Acts.  Specific topics include: agreements among competitors (including cartels) to restrict competition; price uniformity and other parallel behavior in the absence of agreement; distribution relationships having collusive and exclusionary effects (resale price maintenance, geographical and other restrictions on resale, exclusive dealing, tying contracts); monopolization; and mergers.