Legal Environment of Business

The purpose of this research is to examine The Legal Environment of Business by Michael P. Litka and Mark S. Blodgett, with a view toward explicating a strong and useful definition of business law in connection with the issues surrounding its international applications. The plan of the research will be to set forth a context from which international business law needs to be understood in the current period, and then to discuss specific features of the international political economy that make distinguish law from its purely domestic counterparts in the nations of the world.

The intent of Litka and Blodgett in this book appears to be to provide a general overview of the principal factors of which commercial enterprises should be aware when they contemplate doing business on a global scale. Litka and Blodgett suggest that global business activity is virtually mandated in the modern world, which has seen nothing short of a revolution in telecommunications and transportation. As such facilities have expanded, the world itself has effectively contracted, with the result that for many more businesses than ever, foreign trade is likely to be a component of commercial enterprise operations. Yet international law, particularly where doing business is concerned, is doubtless little considered and even less understood by many of the very entities that engage in (or seek to engage in) foreign trade.

The readership that Litka and Blodgett are targeting is Western, American, and corporat

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995, p. 18). That much seems a matter of common sense, but there is a gap between the general definition and the detailed application, in practice, of variable (sometimes competing) historical and legal traditions. Then there is the issue of unpredictability associated with any business arrangement: "Every contractual relationship is subject to events unanticipated by the parties that will impact on performance. To the extent that a contract does not anticipate these events and the parties are unable to resolve them, the courts may be called upon to make the necessary adjustments" (Litka & Blodgett, 1995, p. 114). Litka and Blodgett frame their discussion with reference to three areas--sovereignty, treaties, and multinational enterprises--but within these three categories are many details that are subject to the vicissitudes of domestic politics and international relations, which (like economic conditions around the world) may vary country to country, year by year. Consider for example the issue of contract enforcement or performance, just cited. It is all very well to declare that a court may have to interpret or otherwise adjust a contract. But which country's court will have jurisdiction over the matter, and what factors will

Category: Government - L