Legal Studies and Business Ethics

Overview

Key facts:

• The Legal Studies and Business Ethics courses students at the University of Pennsylvania take in this program help them explore how responsible business leaders can engage ethically and effectively with diverse cultures, corporate stakeholders, government regulators, and legal systems.
• Of special value to students seeking to broaden their business education, this concentration also helps them acquire essential, non-quantitative reasoning skills that are required when leaders face difficult choices under conditions of empirical uncertainty and/or moral ambiguity – a frequent occurrence in fast-moving market economies.  Students pursuing this concentration will gain a number of analytic skills, including: identifying moral and legal issues hidden within complex, culturally rich fact patterns; reasoning from moral principles (including both utilitarian, efficiency-based norms and imperatives such as freedom and equality) to specific ethical and legal conclusions; reasoning by analogy between like cases and situations; and arguing from authoritative rules and precedents to specific, logically consistent recommendations for action.
• Thus, the Legal Studies & Business Ethics Concentration not only fully satisfies the need for a primary undergraduate concentration, but also complements (for students with the capacity to double concentrate) other, more quantitatively oriented concentrations to be found at the Wharton School in such areas as finance, accounting, statistics, marketing, business analytics, insurance and risk management, operations, and information systems.