One day, two young fish are swimming along. On their way they meet an older fish swimming in the opposite direction. The older fish, seeing the young fish, nods and says, “Morning boys, how’s the water today?” The young fish don’t respond and swim on, and then one of them looks at the other and asks, “What the hell is water?”

Maybe the anecdote rings a bell. For those of you who are familiar with the late American writer David Foster Wallace, you may realize that it comes straight out of his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College in Ohio.

COMM 393 Commercial Law has been widely regarded as one of the most challenging courses in the Bachelor of Commerce program at the Sauder school. Some students find it easy, others have described it as a challenging subject, a tough bone to chew on, and a GPA decimator. As for myself, I really enjoyed the course, but agree that hard works must be done to truly appreciate and succeed in COMM 393.

As a continuation of my passion for this course, and legal studies in general, I decided to write this blog to help future students better understand what the instructors, the textbook, and the cases are all saying. You may be here because you like the course and are really curious to find out more about it. Or you may be disappointed by your recent exam and decide to dig deeper into the books. Or maybe you just want to check things out before stepping into the woods. In this blog, I will try to accommodate all these expectations. Wish me luck.

The general idea behind COMM 393 is to give students a real exposure of the laws and juridical systems of this country. For many of you, this will be the first and last law course you will take. For some others, this may the first of the many to come. But for all of us, Commercial Law is intended to provide some of the most fundamental understandings of the working of law in the context of business practices.

Law is one of the oldest institutions in the history of civilization. Rules and regulations have governed human conducts for millennia, from the twelve books of Ancient Egyptian civil codes to the Babylonian laws codified in stones, to the British Common Law system and the Continental Civil Law system that govern much of the world’s countries today. One may believe in the strict imposition or relaxed enforcement of law, but in the civilized society that we are today, many would agree the necessity of the rule of law.

Yet law itself is not something that occupies the minds of most of us. It seems to only come to us when you see a police car signaling you to pull over, or when your neighbour refuses to tune down his party. It may just sounds so strange to you that something that affects nearly all aspects of our lives are basically invisible.

This is a problem that many entry level law courses, like COMM 393, attempt to address. Especially in business and professional contexts, the understanding of law can fundamentally impact your decisions. After studying Commercial Law, you would be better equipped to protect yourself from pitfalls and accusations, and better secure your rights when the situation demands it.

This blog is intended to assist students in the course of COMM 393, and NOT to replace the lectures or course works. In discussing the contents of the course, I will assume that the reader is a reasonable undergraduate student who do not skip classes and required readings. (More will be discussed regarding the “reasonable person” concept in a later post.)

Aside from the required textbook and article readings, I highly recommend the book What Every Law Student Really Needs To Know by Tracey George and Suzanna Sherry. George and Sherry are law professors at the Vanderbilt University, and authored this book mainly to prepare students with the first year of law school. Nevertheless, the book covers many basic concepts that could facilitate your success in COMM 393 in the months to come, which may or may not be covered by your COMM 393 instructor.

In addition, I will provide some short notes on formal logics. While formal logic is not a required component of the course, it may help you better understand the laws and applications covered in the course. I will thus make light references to formal logics when explaining certain parts of the course contents. For those of you who have taken introductory level computer science or philosophy courses, you may always have a decent understanding of formal logics, in which case you may choose to directly dive in to the meat of this blog. Otherwise, I suggest you at least give a glance to the notes on formal logics first.

If you’ve actually made this far and read everything in this post, thank you, and good job. Give yourself a pat on the back. I wish you all good luck in this course. Now, without further ado, let us begin.