Business Law

Yue (Lisa) Zhang

BUSN 420

May 11, 2013

Week 1 Assignment

As a new manager in your department, you are tasked with the job of providing employee training for members of your department who have interactions with the legal department. In order to ensure that everyone can effectively work with the legal staff, you must prepare a series of training document primers on various areas of law and legal concepts that are generally encountered in your company's day-to-day operations.

As an introduction to this training series, write a two-to-three page paper outlining the common law tradition and sources of law. In your treatment of these topics, you should also include a discussion of:

What is common law?

Common Law is the body of law developed from custom or judicial decisions in English and U.S. courts, not attributable to a legislature (Miller 7).

What are the sources of American law?

There are numerous sources of American law. Primary sources of law, or sources that establish the law, include the following:

• The U.S. Constitution and the constitutions of the various states.

• Statutes, or laws, passed by Congress and by state legislatures.

• Regulations created by administrative agencies, such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (Miller 4).

Secondary sources of law are books and articles that summarize and clarify the primary sources of law. Legal encyclopedias, compilations (such as Restatements of the Law, which summarize court decisions on a particular topic), official comments to statutes, treatises, articles in law reviews published by law schools, and articles in other legal journals are examples of secondary sources of law (Miller 5).

What is the importance of precedent to the judicial decision-making process?

Under the doctrine of stare decisis, once a court has set forth a principle of law as being applicable to a certain set of facts, that court and courts of lower rank must adhere to that principle and apply it in future cases...