The Volokh Conspiracy

My Enterprise Organizations course touched on these torts, and I am writing this while taking a break from researching precisely these issues (indeed, the attorneys involved in the underlying transaction would have done well to have taken such a course!). I found this class to be among the more practical and helpful classes I took in law school, and anyone contemplating a career in the private sector (either counselling or litigating) should take a similar class. Of course, the subject matter will not be applicable to all practices, and it's impossible for students to predict what their practices will look like even a few years out of law school, but those whose clients might include businesspeople or corporations would be well-advised to select into this elective, and law schools should make it available.

It seems like this stuff can usually be folded into first year torts or contracts. In practice they are easy torts to learn, and frequently piggy backed onto contractual causes of action (unless there is no colorable argument for an existing contract) and in any case duplicate basic contractual and tort theories of damages. Such a class would go near the bottom of my list as useful to business lawyers, far below secured transactions, bankruptcy, antitrust, securities regulation, etc. But if the professor had a unique expertise and could fill out the class with truly sophisticated analysis and content, I guess it would be a different story.

The subject might be more "courseworthy" if it included professional liability -- legal, accounting, engineering.

I did not take such a course, but I think it would be extremely helpful. Most commercial litigation involves such business torts.

I don't think 2 weeks in torts or contracts as a first year is sufficient basis to cover what most commercial litigators spend their careers handling.

The interplay between contract and tort (the so-called) contort is very important and not easy to understand. And, the issue of how to prove damages would be a great part of the course. While contracts classes include a brief unit on damages, the bigges issue in many commercial cases is whether the damages are too speculative. Learning that would be a great benefit.

A high-level law-school course bringing together the more basic concepts could be quite useful.

I was a litigator at a 300+ lawyer firm for 10 years and am now in-house litigation counsel for a Fortune 500 company -- In both positions I had too many cases to count involving these types of claims. It would be helpful for aspiring litigators to have some knowledge of these types of claims before they leave law school. Certainly would be more useful than memorizing the Blue Book.

I think that it really depends on your practice. I have had need of such, but have done just fine by using the usual types of legal resources available to practicing attorneys.

I think all of the "core" courses are useful. It is the "[fill in the blank] and the Law" (e.g., Feminism and the Law, Literature and the Law) type classes -- which are seemingly beloved by the faculty -- that are utterly useless.

I didn't take that course, either, but that hasn't stopped anyone else from commenting.

Here's a new question: is posting comments on EV's blog, even though he asks you not to, because you don't belong to a certain class*, tortious interference with his blog?

Like I said, I wouldn't know the answer to this, because I didn't take the class.

* pun not intended.

Like others here, I did not take a separate class on the subject, but only touched upon them in torts/contracts/BusOrg classes. And as a commercial litigator, I would have found these useful to have studied (with the usual caveat about having to re-learn everything one uses in real life, regardless of what one studied in law school). But I agree with Keyes/JDB: adding in the statutory causes of action would be helpful.

Every single complaint I see is loaded with a standard assortment of those kinds of claims as boilerplate filler to what they're really complaining about. I suppose therefore it would have been useful to have taken a course like that in law school. Courts are sometimes surprisingly vague about the elements of those causes of action. It would probably take a bit of work to make sure there's enough stuff their for a full course. Though I sort of agree with Brian G, that if you can make room on the calendar for things like "gender and the law" I don't see why you can't make room for stuff you'll actually be dealing with after you graduate.

Yes, I took a "business torts" class. It was very useful and I have used the knowledge on numerous occasions. One of my first assignments as a new associate was regarding trade secrets and restrictive employment covenants. Over the years I have had to deal with litigation regarding interference with contract, interference with prospective economic advantage, trade secrets (computer programs and the classic "customer list" cases). I have dealt with unfair competition and state trade name and trade mark issues. The knowledge is also useful for transactional work, e.g. does this business need a federal trademark or is the substantially cheaper state registration sufficient? If you represent small local businesses, most of the protections and issues that arise involve state law, local competitors, employees, partnership issues and business sales. What is a reasonable non-compete agreement under the circumstances? (I have seen numerous instances where drafters write facially excessive non-compete agreements-and therefore invalid-to "protect" their client.) How do I document/set up a system where my customer information will be protected as a trade secret? Can I use this picture I found on the internet for my advertising? (Or, oops, I used this picture,and got this letter.) This is the milieu in which the Ma and Pa store, small businesses, salesman, and small entrepreneurs, real estate partnerships and venture investors operate. The more glamorous federal issues have much less impact on them. When I compare the usefulness of this course to my antitrust course, I have to say this one was far more useful for the real world everyday problems of small businesses.