Grad school is finishing up the last program, and has given us the books and schedule for the one that starts March 29th. One of my four new classes is Law and Corporate Social Responsibility, and one of the assigned papers we need to read and understand before the first day of class is the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
I'm posting about this because reading through this document is bringing up a tsunami of copy-editing twitches, and I'm not even a particularly excellent copy-editor. A period where there should be comma confused me for several minutes. There are parts that are, going from the numbering, just flat out missing. There's a pattern of a hard line feed just before an "in order to" that I still can't decide if it's intended to be part of the previous sentence (which ends in a comma, which would lead me to think that it does) or be some sort of break like a bullet point would be.
About the only law-making I've watched in action has been the WorldCon bylaws and Hugo rules, where such things would be quickly spotted and fixed or at least made more clear.
Is there a standard "guide to reading official government statutes" that might help me come to terms with this thing?
I'm posting about this because reading through this document is bringing up a tsunami of copy-editing twitches, and I'm not even a particularly excellent copy-editor. A period where there should be comma confused me for several minutes. There are parts that are, going from the numbering, just flat out missing. There's a pattern of a hard line feed just before an "in order to" that I still can't decide if it's intended to be part of the previous sentence (which ends in a comma, which would lead me to think that it does) or be some sort of break like a bullet point would be.
About the only law-making I've watched in action has been the WorldCon bylaws and Hugo rules, where such things would be quickly spotted and fixed or at least made more clear.
Is there a standard "guide to reading official government statutes" that might help me come to terms with this thing?
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alicebentley- Alice Bentley
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Not sure why, but it seems to me that
Also, this link to BELL may be of use to you next semester. BELL is the acronym for The Business Ethics Links Library : Resources for Research in Business Ethics and Social Responsibility, maintained at the
William M. White Business Library, Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado at Boulder.
From the web site: "The BELL is a comprehensive starting point for research in corporate ethics and social responsibility. The database provides access to codes of ethics for U.S. companies and trade and professional associations, ethics sites at college and university business programs, industry information resources, and company promotion of social responsibility covering such topics as arts assistance, environmental clean up, charitable giving and community programming."
Hope that helps ease your pain. And good luck with the legalese. If you get in a real bind, call
Most of the business law is.
This is a result of being cobbled together by committees, and amended, and shot through government rapidly, because, as you're about to find out, most business law is written in response to Something Happening Right Now Which Must Be Stopped. (see also: Enron=Sarbanes-Oxley) The only advantage to law wriitten in the last few years is that they had the advantage of spell check.
Edited at 2009-02-26 03:42 am (UTC)