Executive Juris Doctor: Substantive Law for Business Professionals
About this audiobook
Executive Juris Doctor covers the business courses offered in a typical law school curriculum. Rather than including criminal law and other non-business courses, this course focuses solely on business-related legal disciplines. Your goal should be to understand the basic principles of law and be able to think like a lawyer. You don't have to be a lawyer to represent yourself in small matters; however, you do need to know when to hire an attorney and when you can handle the matter yourself. Judges typically allow greater latitude for discretion when dealing with pro se matters; however, you first want to acquire a rudimentary understanding of the fundamental principles of law, including contracts, civil law and procedure, property law, wills & trusts law, corporate law, insurance law, and labor law. These courses are essential for understanding the general principles of business law and how the legal system interacts with business and society.
Taking notes and developing an outline is standard practice for law students and helps significantly to retain critical information. In the study of law, try to think in a back-and-forth iambic pentameter manner and always be prepared to argue either side. In a classroom setting, the instructor typically assigns legal cases for students to review and draft a brief. The brief should be just that, as brief as possible. When called on at random, students recite the facts, identify the issue, state the rule of law, and conclude. The instructor, playing Socrates, will keep questioning the student and subtly altering the facts to test the student's ability to speak extemporaneously and answer logically, based on the case's rationale. The most critical aspect of thinking like a lawyer, beyond just understanding the laws themselves, is analyzing facts, assessing the most vital issues, determining what the rule of law is, and understanding its rationale.
About the author
My name is Sebastian Buroughs Windsor III. In 1976, I earned a bachelor's degree in business sciences from the University of San Francisco and a Master's in Business Administration in 1980 from Virginia Commonwealth University. I earned my Juris Doctor degree from the University of Southern California in 1984 and my LLM in 2016. I began my legal career as a law clerk to Federal Circuit Court Judge Harold Strokes; from there I became a newspaper business and constitutional legal editor with the San Francisco Chronicle, and later, as the newspaper business began a decline in readership, I began working abroad as a foreign business and engineering legal correspondent for Osaka University. Some of my greatest successes in writing involved explaining complex legal/business engineering surveys to non-engineers or lawyers. I feel my best talent is to explain complex matters in simplified terms. The study of Law is difficult enough without using a vocabulary that requires a dictionary to figure out. In the study of law, you are forced to think in the abstract, as opposed to everything being either black or white. It also requires thinking in a structured manner on the one hand, but requires creative thinking simultaneously. In the study of law, using the Socratic method, you learn to think on your feet and speak extemporaneously ad infinitum on just about any doctrine of law. My objective, since the Socratic method is not available, is to explain legal principles so that most people can understand them, and for you to use that knowledge to go out and further your career.
