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 corporate, and their descriptions of standard terms and concepts governing the confluence of business practices and the laws of many nations appear intended as a foundation for operational literacy. The focus is definitional and programmatically instructive, not theoretical, although such how-to emphasis as there is has more to do with acquiring familiarity with the vocabulary of international business law than with methods of operation in response to it. In any case, ...