2Ls, 3Ls, and beyond: Explain Business Law v. Commercial Law Forum

[MisterChase]

My school offers these two focus areas. The school site isn't much help on elaborating the distinction between the two, other than that commercial law is a bit more UCC intensive. But shit, any good business lawyer worthy of the title ought to know the UCC as well so that's not a helpful distinction. And likewise, the business law curriculum has more focus on business organizations, but again, I say any commercial lawyer worth his or her salt better damn well know that shit too. So I tried Googling "A day in the life of a business lawyer" and the same for commercial lawyer, and that only seemed to further my suspicion that there isn't that much of a difference between the two. It gave me the strong impression that "business lawyer" and "commercial lawyer" are interchangeable terms.

Enlighten me, please.

[patrickd139]

Unless I'm wrong (entirely possible), it seems like business v. commercial law IRL seems like semantics. Clearly, your school has made a differentiation between the two. Have you talked to your CSO or Dean of Students or whoever usually fields this type of question?

My guess: they had two programs that were similar in many aspects, yet different in a few key ways, needed two names, and named one Business Law and the other Commercial Law.

[Black-Blue]

As you recognized, the usual distinction is that business law is about the structure of the business itself. For example, when can one partner sue another partner, when can a stockholder sue a director, etc. Commercial law is about transactions between businesses (banking transactions, A sells this to B, etc).