Skip to ContentGo to accessibility pageKeyboard shortcuts menu
OpenStax Logo

Welcome to Business Law I Essentials, an OpenStax resource. This textbook was written to increase student access to high-quality learning materials, maintaining the highest standards of academic rigor at little to no cost.

About OpenStax

OpenStax is a nonprofit based at Rice University, and it’s our mission to improve student access to education. Our first openly licensed college textbook was published in 2012, and our library has since scaled to over 30 books for college and AP® courses used by hundreds of thousands of students. OpenStax Tutor, our low-cost personalized learning tool, is being used in college courses throughout the country. Through our partnerships with philanthropic foundations and our alliance with other educational resource organizations, OpenStax is breaking down the most common barriers to learning and empowering students and instructors to succeed.

About OpenStax resources

Attribution and Customization

Business Law I Essentials was developed by Barnes and Noble Education LoudCloud and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC-BY-NC-SA), which means that noncommercial entities can remix and build upon the content, as long as they provide attribution to OpenStax and its content contributors and redistribute it under the same license as the original.

Because our books are openly licensed, you are free to use the book in its current format or augment it with additional content, cases, or other teaching materials. Feel free to remix the content by assigning your students certain chapters and sections in your syllabus, in the order that you prefer. You can even provide a direct link in your syllabus to the sections in the web view of your book.

Art attribution

In Business Law I Essentials, most art contains attribution to its title, creator, or rights holder, host platform, and license within the caption. Because the art is openly licensed, anyone may reuse the art as long as they provide the same attribution to its original source and share it under the same license as the original art.

Errata

All OpenStax textbooks undergo a review process. However, like any professional-grade textbook, errors sometimes occur. Since our books are web based, we can make updates periodically when deemed pedagogically necessary. If you have a correction to suggest, submit it through the link on your book page on openstax.org. Subject matter experts review all errata suggestions. OpenStax is committed to remaining transparent about all updates, so you will also find a list of past errata changes on your book page on openstax.org.

Format

You can access this textbook for free in web view or PDF through openstax.org, and for a low cost in print.

About Business Law I Essentials

Business Law I Essentials is a brief introductory textbook designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of courses on Business Law or the Legal Environment of Business. The concepts are presented in a streamlined manner, and cover the key concepts necessary to establish a strong foundation in the subject. The textbook follows a traditional approach to the study of business law. Each chapter contains learning objectives, explanatory narrative and concepts, references for further reading, and end-of-chapter questions.

Business Law I Essentials may need to be supplemented with additional content, cases, or related materials, and is offered as a foundational resource that focuses on the baseline concepts, issues, and approaches. OpenStax’s Creative Commons licensing, described above, offers instructors and course designers a great deal of flexibility in its use.

Community Hubs

OpenStax partners with the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) to offer Community Hubs on OER Commons—a platform for instructors to share community-created resources that support OpenStax books, free of charge. Through our Community Hubs, instructors can upload their own materials or download resources to use in their own courses, including additional ancillaries, teaching material, multimedia, and relevant course content. We encourage instructors to join the hubs for the subjects most relevant to your teaching and research as an opportunity both to enrich your courses and to engage with other faculty.

To reach the Community Hubs, visit www.oercommons.org/hubs/OpenStax.

Technology Partners

As allies in making high-quality learning materials accessible, our technology partners offer optional low-cost tools that are integrated with OpenStax books. To access the technology options for your text, visit your book page on openstax.org.

Answers to Questions in the Book

Students are provided with answers to odd-numbered Assessment Questions via the Answer Key in the book. All answers are provided to instructors in the Instructor's Answer Guide via the Instructor Resources page.

Contributing Authors and Reviewers

Mirande Valbrune, Esq. Employment Lawyer

Renee De Assis Texas Woman's University

Suzanne Cardell, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

Tess C. Taylor, Walden University

Dr. Natalie Sappleton, Smartly Institute

C. M. Mitchell, Ashford University

Kenneth Mitchell-Phillips, Portland Community College

Order a print copy

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

Citation/Attribution

This book may not be used in the training of large language models or otherwise be ingested into large language models or generative AI offerings without OpenStax's permission.

Want to cite, share, or modify this book? This book uses the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License and you must attribute OpenStax.

Attribution information
  • If you are redistributing all or part of this book in a print format, then you must include on every physical page the following attribution:
    Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/business-law-i-essentials/pages/1-introduction
  • If you are redistributing all or part of this book in a digital format, then you must include on every digital page view the following attribution:
    Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/business-law-i-essentials/pages/1-introduction
Citation information

© Mar 31, 2023 OpenStax. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License . The OpenStax name, OpenStax logo, OpenStax book covers, OpenStax CNX name, and OpenStax CNX logo are not subject to the Creative Commons license and may not be reproduced without the prior and express written consent of Rice University.