Recasting legal literacy in the management curriculum: business law, responsibility, and sustainability
Babu GeorgePurpose
This paper conceptualizes the persistent deficiencies of business law education in MBA, undergraduate business, and management programs as a responsible management education (RME) problem. It develops a framework for aligning business law instruction with the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME).
Design/methodology/approach
The paper synthesizes scholarship on business law pedagogy, RME and PRME, the hidden curriculum, and integrative ethics-responsibility-sustainability (ERS) competence. From this literature, the paper identifies four theoretical traditions: experiential learning theory, situated cognition, the manager-as-legal-strategist paradigm, and responsible management competence and practical wisdom. These traditions are then combined into a framework in which each tradition addresses limitations of the others.
Findings
The doctrine-practice divide is better understood as a category error than as a resource problem. Business law courses are often designed as compressed law-school courses rather than as applied reasoning courses for future managers. This design produces a hidden curriculum that conflicts with the explicit PRME commitments of many business schools. The paper further argues that five recurring symptoms – excessive content coverage, student disengagement and perceived irrelevance, poor fit between law-school methods and business classrooms, memorization-oriented assessment, and hidden-curriculum effects – operate as a mutually reinforcing system. The Legal Literacy Integration Model (LLIM) is proposed as a three-pillar framework organized around contextual legal reasoning, ethical-legal convergence, and experiential scaffolding. A venture-launch module illustrates the model, and the paper specifies boundary conditions, including contexts in which sustained doctrinal grounding remains appropriate.
Research limitations/implications
As a conceptual contribution, LLIM is an analytical framework rather than an empirical claim. Its propositions require comparative learning-outcome studies, longitudinal tracking of graduates, and cross-cultural research on implementation, especially in Global South contexts.
Practical implications
LLIM offers curriculum designers, faculty developers, and accreditation bodies a coherent design logic for embedding ethics, stakeholder responsibility, and sustainability into business law without adding courses or hours. It also identifies the hidden curriculum risks that conventional doctrinal teaching poses to RME goals.
Social implications
Embedding PRME-aligned legal literacy in management education contributes to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by preparing graduates who can address the legal, ethical, and sustainability dimensions of managerial decisions and protect the public affected by organizational conduct.
Originality/value
The paper positions recurring deficiencies in business law education as deficiencies in responsible management education and integrates legal pedagogy, hidden-curriculum analysis, and ERS competence development into a single course-design framework. Its contribution lies in diagnosing the interaction among these problems and linking their remediation to PRME commitments. The paper also proposes a research agenda at the intersection of legal literacy, PRME, and managerial practical wisdom.