I offer a goal or objective for Pam's legal environment 
course that seems especially important to teach for a 
business school discipline:

    "Law is a (perhaps, the) foundation for material and
financial wealth creation in the economies of modern 
nations."

For those interested, I recommend a series of three articles
I've written , which you may find at 38 ABLJ 441, 41 ABLJ 
459, and 36 Vand. J. Transnat'l L. 673. Achieving the stated 
objective in my course does not detract from teaching the 
rules of various legal subjects, but rather it unifies the 
various subject areas and provides a testable theoretical 
justification for teaching legal studies in business 
schools. Very briefly, I make my claim concerning the 
importance of law on the following basis:

1. In  political theory from both common and civil law 
traditions, the state comes into existence to protect 
private "property," understood to be an entirely legal right 
to exclude others from some limited resource. According to 
Madison's account, no fewer than five members of the U.S. 
Contitutional Convention stated that the purpose of the 
state was to protect what is privately proper to people, and 
the proposition is not historically controversial.

2 Private exclusionary right is at the center of so-called 
Western legal systems. Other areas of law radiate from 
property like the spokes from a wheel. Contract law concerns 
how owners exchange their private resources in a property-
based legal system. Tort law concerns the limitations on 
private resource use in a property-based legal system, i.e., 
it identifies when property boundaries have been crossed 
("trespass is the fertile mother of actions") and 
establishes compensation for injuries resulting from such 
crossing.

3.Material and financial wealth is generated by a legal 
framework of private exclusionary right, probably because--
as economists have always asserted--we humans are self-(and 
family-)interested by nature. What many economists still 
arn't entirely aware of is that the private market in the 
modern nation absolutely requires an adequately enforced 
private property legal system in order to function properly. 
One economist who does grasp this is Alan Greenspan, who has 
asserted repeatedly that property (and contract) are 
necessary to help emerging economies produce wealth in a 
private market.

4. All nations recognize some applications of private 
property law, but not all nations apply it in the same way. 
A great many nations also lack working legal enforcement 
institutions. The controversial part of private property is 
whether or not a nation applies private property to 
productive activities. Since many studies associate private 
property with high GNP, it would seem that a nation would 
want to apply strong property law to whatever it wants to 
produce more of.

5. Property is a legal concept and has neither a 
conservative nor a liberal political agendum in itself. It 
may be applied to produce more widgets or more clean air and 
personal safety, depending on what society wants to produce 
more of. The trick is to recognize and analyze where the 
property is.

How does it not work in the best inteerest of our discipline 
to teach the importance of law in this 
fashion?