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The purpose of this web page is to provide links to primary sources, updates, and other interesting sites for students in Babson College's Law 1003 and 7000 courses. The site is arranged by the topics covered in the foundation law courses.
Entrepreneurship/Business Organizations
The web is chock full of excellent resources for researching law and business. Many of the sites on this web page will send you to other interesting places for research. There are some places, however, that are good starting points should you have a project and need a place to start. Unfortunately, with new web sites coming on line every day, there is no one central source of legal information on the web. Comprehensive legal research on the web will require browsing a variety of sites.
The grandparent of law web sites for research is the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School. Two other law school sites that are excellent resources for legal research are the World Wide Web Virtual Library at Indiana University School of Law and Emory University's Law Library Electronic Reference Desk . The Law Library of Congress maintains a data base of law around the world at the Global Legal Information Network(GLIN) .
A good general reference source is the American Bar Association's Law Link . There are also several very helpful commercial web sites providing links to a wide range of legal materials. Findlaw is a standard research tool for law on the Internet. You may also want to browse the Internet Legal Resource Guide and the National Law Net for extensive references to topics covered in the basic business law courses.
There are several interesting web sites providing collections of information about the government of the U.S. The official government portal is FirstGov . Another useful portal for government information and web sites is The Great American Web Site . For the Executive Branch, see the White House website. For the Legislative Branch, the most definitive source of information is Thomas , the Congressional data base. The federal courts maintain a Federal Judiciary site. Supreme Court decisions since 1990 are available on-line from Cornell.
Two of the best sites around for American culture and government are the Smithsonian Institutions and the Library of Congress .
For a more global perspective, you might want to browse Governments on the WWW .
To see the Constitution, as well as other founding documents of democracies, see the National Archives Documents Exhibit . The University of Wuerzberg maintains an portal for International Constitutional Law , with excellent informationa about constitutions around the world.
The general sites above will have links to many court decisions from state and federal courts. One of the most interesting sites for Supreme Court decisions is Oyez Oyez Oyez , a searchable data base of Supreme Court decisions. This site also has audio clips of arguments before the Court, Justices reading famous decisions, and even an interactive game comparing the Justices to baseball players.. For information about current trials in the news, The Court TV Law Center contains analysis and lots of original source documents. For a more historical point of view, see the Famous Trials web site at the UMKC School of Law.
The general sites listed earlier will have extensive links to government regulatory agencies. You may also want to try Villanova University's Federal Web Locator .
The American Arbitration Association has a fairly comprehensive site that is pretty interesting. More specifically related to the securities industry is an Arbitration Information Center in the Online Guide to Securities Law. On a global basis, the International Chamber of Commerce offers a variety of dispute resolution services, including arbitration.
Just for fun, you may want to see the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List . Another interesting and informative site is the National Fraud Information Center . The Department of Justice maintains a comprehensive site concerning computer crime at CyberCrime .
It's hard to know whether to put this site here or under contract, tort or criminal law, but the Better Business Bureau Home Page has a lot of information about ethical and unethical business practices. The DePaul University Institute for Business and Professional Ethics is a good resource for further exploration of ethical issues in business.
The classic statement of the values of a socially responsible corporation is Johnson & Johnson's Credo, available, along with lots of other interesting information, at J & J's home page. You may also want to see the corporate governance information below.
There is an overabundance of good information about all forms of intellectual property lawon the web, with new sites coming on line frequently. For global IP issues, see the site of the World Intellectual Property Organization ( WIPO ). Intellectual Property Magazine On-Line has many articles about current issues. The Franklin Pierce Law Center's Intellectual Property Mall is a comprehensive resource of useful information on intellectual property, as is the Intellectual Property Law Server . For criminal sanctions, see the Cybercrime site at the U.S. Department of Justice.
The Copyright Site is an excellent place to go for information about all aspects of copyright law. It has good plain-English explanations of the law that copyright users will need to know. For a more official, but still very useful version of the law, the U.S. Copyright Office of the Library of Congress maintains its own information and forms, as well as helpful links to other resources .
For general information about patents and trademarks, see the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO ) site. WIPO has information about the new structure of the Internet, and how the Internet registrars will handle trademark issues. See also the ICANN web site for significant information about the domain name system and its relationship to trademarks.
The Delphion Patent Network has comprehensive information and a searchable data base of patents. It also has a delightful Gallery of obscure patents. For more general information, see the USPTO site. You may also want to visit the European Patent Office . For a more entrepreneurial take on patents, see the Patent Cafe . On the other side of the coin, Bountyquest offers rewards to individuals who discover patent defects. The site is worth a look.
In addition to the general sites above, the Trade Secrets Home Page is an interesting place to visit for links to information about trade secrets.
The Consumer Law Page has a lot of information about all kinds of consumer frauds and scams. For practical information, see Findlaw 's extensive set of links about business contracts. A good source of information about e-commerce is the Methven Law firm's E-Commerce page. Finally, the definitive U.S. source for information on the Convention on the International Sale of Goods is Pace University's Institute of International Commercial Law .
The web is an excellent place to look for a job. In addition to Babson's CCD, students can find a good web site at Job Web .
The most comprehensive source of plain-language information on employment law is at Findlaw .
The Kauffman Foundation's EntreWorld is an excellent starting point for all kinds of information about business start-ups, as is the small business information at Findlaw. Another excellent site is Arizona State University's Small Business Resources page. Another very interesting site is the SmartBusiness Supersite . Browse there for links to articles and other information on a wide range of business topics.
Should you wish to incorporate or form an LLC on line, see the Business Incorporating Guide .
The process of going public is complex and requires careful consideration. One useful source of information on-line is the SEC's Q & A: Small Business and the SEC . A more formal collection of links related to securities law issues is the Online Guide to Securities Law .
For company information, see Hoover's Online . The Yahoo! Finance Index of Companies contains research and trading data for nearly 20,000 U.S. Companies.
In recent years, institutional shareholders have become more active in evaluating the quality of corporate governance. One site examining this issue is the home page of the Council of Institutional Investors . Another activist institutional shareholder on the web is the California Public Employees Retirement System ( CALPERS ). A private firm using the potential for shareholder activism as a partial basis for its investment decisions is Lens, Inc . You can find a comprehensive site, with links to many additional resources on corporate governance, at Corporate Governance Net .
The Social Investment Forum has created an Online Guide to SRI . It is a fairly comprehensive look at the issues involved in Socially Responsible Investing.