Legal Environment of Business (LEB)
Introduction
The IROM Department is the home of the McCombs School’s Legal Environment of Business (LEB) Division. The AACSB, the accrediting agency for business schools, recently recognized that one of the most important skill sets for any business student, graduate or undergraduate, is the ability to operate a firm legally and ethically. As a Fortune 500 company executive noted recently, “[i]t is not possible to think of a [business] strategy that doesn’t have a legal compliance and regulatory element to it.”
The IROM Department’s Legal Environment of Business Division teaches students how to gain a competitive advantage by being aware of the regulatory and ethical constraints that all businesses face. LEB faculty members teach graduate and undergraduate courses as well as executive education programs and provide cutting-edge legal scholarship in a broad-range of areas regarding the intersection of law and business.
Leading Business-Related Scholarship
The Legal Environment of Business faculty members have not only published several leading textbooks in the area of business education, they have also published more articles in top journals than any other LEB group in the nation. Their publications have recently appeared in such leading academic journals as the Yale Law Journal, the University of Chicago Law Review, the California Law Review, the New York University Law Review, the Cornell Law Journal, the Northwestern University Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Texas Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, the American Business Law Journal, the Northwestern University Journal of Law and Business, the Journal of Law and Economics, the International Review of Law and Economics, the Journal of Business Ethics, and the Business Ethics Quarterly. Some of these works have won research awards.
Excellence in Classroom Teaching
The Legal Environment of Business faculty is well-regarded for its excellent classroom teachers. Several members of the LEB have won multiple teaching awards over the years, including several campus-wide and even national awards. The highest teaching honor bestowed at the University of Texas is membership in the Academy of Distinguished Teachers. Two of the seven tenured LEB faculty members are members of the Academy. In recent years, LEB faculty members have received, among others, the following additional campus-wide teaching awards at UT: the Friar Society Teaching Fellowship, the Chancellor’s Council Outstanding Teaching Award, and the Amoco Foundation Award. The LEB faculty members have won much more than their proportion of business school teaching awards as well, including the Excellence-in-Education Award, the CBA Texas Excellence Teaching Award, and the Hank & Mary Harkins Award for Teaching Excellence.
In addition four of the seven full-time members of the faculty have received the national Faculty Award of Excellence presented annually by the Academy of Legal Studies in Business (ALSB), the national faculty organization for legal environment scholars and professors. Two members of UT’s current LEB faculty have served as president of that national body.
Selected Publications of the Legal Environment of Business Faculty
John R. Allison, et al, “Valuable Patents,” 92 Georgetown Law Journal 435 (2004).
John R. Allison, “The Business Method Patent Myth,” 18 Berkeley Technology Law Journal 987 (2003).
Mark B. Baker, “‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’--Terrorism and Excused Contractual Performance in a Post September 11 World,” 17 Transnational Lawyer 1 (2004)..
Mark B. Baker, “Tightening the Toothless Vise: Codes of Conduct and the American Multinational Enterprise,” 20 Wisconsin International Law Review 89 (2001).
Frank B. Cross, et al., “Above the Rules,” 69 University of Chicago Law Review 135 (2001).
Frank B. Cross, “America the Adversarial,” 89 Virginia Law Review 189 (2003).
Paula C. Murray, “The Law, Economics and Politics of Federal Preemption Jurisprudence: A Quantitative Analysis,” 87 California Law Review 1125 (1999) (with David Spence).
Paula C. Murray, “Fair Weather Federalism and America’s Waste Disposal Crisis,” 27 Harvard Environmental Law Review 71 (2003) (with David Spence).
Robert A. Prentice, “Regulating Investors: A Behavioral Analysis,” 51 Duke Law Journal 1397 (2002).
Robert A. Prentice, “The Case of the Irrational Auditor: A Behavioral Insight Into Securities Fraud Litigation,” 95 Northwestern University Law Review 133 (2000).
Steven R. Salbu, “Regulation of Borderless High-Technology Economics: Managing Spillover Effects,” 3 University of Chicago Journal of International Law 137 (2002).
Steven R. Salbu, “Information Technology in the War Against International Bribery and Corruption: The Next Frontier of Institutional Reform,” 38 Harvard Journal on Legislation 67 (2001).
Bill. M. Shaw, et al., “Exploring the Ethics and Economics of Global Labor Standards: A Challenge to Integrated Social Contract Theory,” 13 Business Ethics Quarterly 193 (2001).
Bill M. Shaw, “Economics and the Environment: A ‘Land Ethic’ Critique of Economic Policy,” 33 Journal of Business Ethics 51 (2001).
