Identify A Current Issue/Story Assessment Answer

Students are required to identify a current issue/story dealing with business law and analyse this in three parts. Each part, and what it is worth as a percentage of your marks, is explained below.

Part 1 – Identify a media report 

You are required to identify a media report that focuses on a business that is dealing with a legal issue. The media report should be from a newspaper or journal.

Part 2 – Legal Analysis 
Once you have identified the media report that you would like to work with, you need to read and analyse it in relation to the legal issues that it raises.

Please note that we do not expect you to be a legal expert!

In your Legal Analysis you need to do the following:
Identify the legal issues raised in the article.
Identify sources of law relevant to the legal issues.
Explain the legal issues. Relevant questions would include:
What aspect of the business’s conduct has raised a legal issue?
What is potentially unlawful about what the business has been doing?
Why has the business been engaging in this conduct?
What are the possible outcomes of the legal issue?
Analyse how the legal issue could impact the business. This will require you to conduct additional research on the business, the industry and/or the law.

Part 3 – Ethical Analysis 

In most cases where a business’s conduct has raised a legal issue, ethical issues will also arise. There are two section to your ethical analysis.

Section 1 – Ethical theory analysis

The Grace & Cohen reading (Attached) discusses several approaches to the orising business ethics, including consequentalism, rights-based approaches and virtue ethics.

Discuss each of these approaches and apply it to the ethical issues raised in the media report:
How would applying each approach impact on the business’s decision-making?
Do the approaches produce different outcomes?
Which do you think is preferable and why?

Section 2 – Stakeholder analysis

The Crane & Matten ( Attached) reading outlines three ways of framing business ethics in practice: corporate social responsibility, stakeholder theory and corporate citizenship. In this assignment, we are going to work with stakeholder theory.

4. Identify the business’s stakeholders.
5. How are the stakeholders likely to be affected by the legal and ethical issues raised in the media report?
6. How should the business’s decision-making be affected by their stakeholders?