Assignment:
Question 1. Is it ethical for a business manager to raise the defense of failure to comply with the Statute of Frauds to avoid enforcement of an oral promise that the manager knows he or she made?
Question 2. Is it unethical, or just good business, to take advantage of someone’s financial hardship to drive a hard bargain? (Hint: mutuality of assent/economic duress).
Question 3. Should business managers offer special consideration to an elderly person who is not incompetent but is less able to understand complex transactions or to understand their own interests, than to a younger person?
Question 4. A pharmaceutical company developed a new, extremely expensive drug to fight a chronic disease. Before new drugs are released into the marketplace, they go through several phases of clinical evaluation in order to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). As part of this process, the company began a clinical trial with 1,000 patients to evaluate the effectiveness, side effects, and potential risks of the new drug. All the patients signed consent forms, warning them of the risks of participation.Although the patients were free to withdraw from the trial at any time, if they remained in the study they were required to accept the risks of treatment, to forgo other drugs, not to become pregnant, and to submit to intensive and uncomfortable testing for one year.In return, after the testing ended, the patients would be entitled to receive the drug for a full year at no charge. At the end of the year-long study, the pharmaceutical company refused to provide the year’s supply of the drug to the patients free of charge. The patients sued for breach of contract; the company alleges there was no binding contract, due to lack of consideration. Discuss the legalities of this scenario. Is it ethical for the company to refuse to supply the drug if the court decides there was no binding contract?