Question

You own a Barbecue Resturant,

a) Choose two areas of public law that we're discussing in this unit (Public Law Areas and The Practical Impacts of Public Law on Business) - administrative law and criminal law. You will opt to select administrative law as one area (since it deals directly with government regulation); be specific in answering the question of what your business will need to do (both at the outset and as a continuing practice) as a cost of government regulatory compliance. With what agency or agencies would your business deal with? Is that agency federal or state? What sort of internal policies would your business have to develop to maintain regulatory compliance? Can you think of any other aspect of administrative law that would be relevant to your business like your business' potential rule in proposed rulemaking or in a hearing before an administrative law judge?

b) Your second area of public law will be more abstract - criminal law. Of course, no one wants their business to be investigated for these crimes but here, identify one or two, list the crimes' elements and briefly discuss how the operation of your business can be conducted in such a way to avoid scrutiny under the selected law's provision.

Answer 1

(a) The two areas of public law are

(i) Compliance to the minimum wages laws. The states have fixed their minimum wages for workers employed in different sectors, which need to be complied to. In order to ensure compliance to the standards, the organisation must know the laws in force, and their updates. It is required to pay the employees a pay slip that includes their weekly hours of work, payments, allowances,deductions as per law and net pay. It also needs to establish, maintain and preserve the past 6 months payrolls records of an employee.

(ii) Health and security laws. The organisation needs to comply to the OSHA guidelines to avoid penalties. The compliance can be ensured by establishing the practices to avoid injuries thorugh risk identification and mitigation through hazard warnigns, training of employees, establishing standards of cleanliness, passage, machine maintenance, establishment of emergency and fire prevention plan, guidelines for storage and use of hazardeous chemicals and goods etc.

Other laws relevant to the business are related to EEOC, which may include discrimination on the grounds of gender, age, disability, ethnicity, race, color, national origin etc. Other cases may pertain to workplace harassmene, sexual intimidation etc.

(b)

The criminal laws relate to the armed conflicts between the group of visitors, drunk or intoxicated customers creating havoc at the place and harming others, acts of terrorism, vandalism and hooliganism among others. To avoid being on the wrong side of law, the restaurant should adopt a drug testing and no weapon policies, in addition to obtaining civic protection and establishing personal security service to deal with the unruly elements.