Cengage Advantage Books: Business Law Today: The Essentials

SUMMARY. The book fills the bill as a "Readers Digest" reference work on general legal principles. But, it is too broad in its treatment to be a reliable resource for comprehensive instructional purposes.

BASIS. This reviewer is an attorney with over 25 years experience teaching business law. The writer uses the 5th edition of this work, and used the 2d, 3d and 4th editions of the text, as a required instructional resource in accordance with directions from academic administrators.

POSITIVE ASPECTS.

- The 5th edition of "Business Law Today, The Essentials" is well written and very readable. The presentation is visually attractive.

- It includes new material on the up-to-date issues created by e-commerce and cyber law.

- There are excellent chapter summaries highlighting, in outline form, the major topics covered in the chapter.

- There are numerous marginal references to Web sites and sources for additional help and information.

CONCERNS.

- Content appears to have been sacrificed for aesthetic white space & wide margins. This has been a continuing trend. With each "new edition" there has been less and less textual material. Major legal concepts are given a short treatment of only a sentence or two. However, the interesting and provocative discussion questions at the end of the chapters raise issues which, if they have been addressed by the courts, cannot be correctly resolved based on the information in the text. The result is students have a misconception as to how a principle works or how the majority of courts might rule. When missing information is added by the instructor, student reaction is frustration and distrust of the text.

-Whole concepts have been deleted from text between editions.(Although, thankfully, the topic of usury, a major concept in business law which was totally deleted from the 4th edition, is again mentioned in the 5th edition.)

- Case examples too often tend to focus on the more colorful, unusual exception to a controlling legal principle, rather than explaining the rationale for the majority rule or demonstrating how a principle works in daily business situations. The result is often student confusion, since one does not learn a general principle where the only example of the its application is an exceptional situation where the general rule is not apply.

- Support materials and test bank answers to questions are unreliable. While the answers given in the test bank are legally correct, about 10-15% of the time it is reported the correct answer to a test bank question cannot be extracted from the textual explanation on the cited page in "The Essentials" edition of the text.