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.

The Unnamed Publisher 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 Flat World 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.
• 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 at http://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.