Business School Alumni Perspectives on the Need for Legal Studies

Law professors who teach in schools of business have continually been forced to serve as advocates for their own presence in the business academy. Despite increasing rates of white-collar crime, ethical misconduct, and bankers run amuck, accrediting bodies for elite colleges and schools of business and, more surprisingly, accounting programs have repeatedly considered scaling back or eliminating requirements for basic legal training. This article adds a third decade of linear data as reaffirming testimony to business students’ continued need for more knowledge of the law. To this end, we survey 185 of our university’s business alumni using the same essential format used in 1990 and 2004. The alumni surveyed were asked to rank their perceived utility of the undergraduate business law course(s) they completed. Then the respondents were asked to rate specific business law topics in terms of their usefulness in the business world and the frequency at which they are encountered. The results of the survey clearly show that many topics which are taught to business students become and remain critically important to those students after they move on to the ranks of alumni and business leaders.