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352 legal aspects
legal aspects
The term `business' has no single recognised
definition or legal meaning. It may mean or
embrace activity or enterprise for gain, benefit,
advantage or livelihood; activity of some continuity,
regularity or permanence; commercial or industrial
establishment or enterprise; constant or continuous
or habitual employment or occupation; efforts of
men to improve their economic conditions and
satisfy their desires; enterprise in which the person
engaged shows willingness to invest time and
capital on future outcome; and every legitimate
avocation in life by which honest support for family
may be obtained �Black's Law Dictionary, 4th edn,
248±9).
It is agreed that any occasional, single or isolated
activities do not constitute business. By the same
token, the meaning of business is not dependent on
whether enterprise is profitable or has prospects of
being profitable. Thus, the legal forces affecting
business in general, and international business in
particular, are boundless and varied. The national
laws governing various aspects of business,
including contracts, agency, corporations, partnerships,
bailments, sales, innkeeping and negotiable
instruments, differ from one country to the other.
Moreover, legal norms of the common law
system vary from legal rules of the civil law orbit.
The common law includes both the `unwritten' law
based on the stare decisis doctrine and statutory law,
which is spoken of as `written' or enacted law. Even
within the same common law system, there is a
distinction between two different remedies, law and
equity. The civil law orbit includes varying legal
systems which might have different solutions to the
same problems, depending upon the nature of the
theories and philosophies underlying these legal
systems. However, it has been proven that there is a
common core of legal systems that transcend the
varying legal norms, even with legal systems
originally based upon divine revelation, such as
Islamic law.
International business is affected by many
thousands of laws and regulations on hundreds of
subjects that normally arise in the course of
international business relations among nations,
multinational firms, international organisations
and national companies of different countries.
Although many nations, both developed and
developing, have laws and regulations that affect
the activities of international firms, there has been
no successful effort to coordinate them. Examples
of these laws are those addressing investments,
taxation, antitrust and restrictive trade practices,
tariffs, quotas and other trade obstacles, product
liability �civil and criminal), labour, price and wage
controls, currency exchange controls, exports and
imports, business contracts, patents, trademarks,
copyrights and trade secrets, intellectual and
technical property, restrictions on dumping and
much more.
The rules applicable to the tourism business,
further, have become immense and varied. Laws
governing tourism, including national policy �if
such exists), national and regional oganisations,
travel agencies and tour operators,
the hotel business, vacation villages, various
modes of transportation, environmental controls,
planning and development, marketing,
the scope and limits of governmental control,
investment incentives, facilitation, bills of rights
and the like, are all part and parcel of the new form
of business law.
Thus, business law touches everyday lives
through every contractual dealing undertaken. A
contract, usually in the form of a commercial
bargain involving some of the exchange of goods or
services for a price, is a legally binding agreement
made by two or more persons, enforceable by the
courts. As such, contracts may be written or oral; to
be binding, they must make an offer and
unqualified acceptance thereof, and include intention
to create legal relations, lawful cause �a
consideration in common law systems) and genuine
consent �that is, absence of fraud). The terms must
be legal, certain and passable of performance.
Contractual dealings, as the cornerstone of all
commercial transactions, have resulted in the
development of specific bodies of law within the
scope of business law that continually evolve to
cover newly emerging areas of human activities.
Thus, all areas relating to competition, anti-trust,
anti-monopoly, consumer protection, computers,
global distribution systems, other information
and communication technology �see information
technology), new forms of ownership as condominiums
and timesharing, including shifting