The legitimacy of business law will depend on businesses adopting it and following it voluntarily and in the belief and expectation that it has been designed and is operated for the wider public good. A perception that regulation is designed exclusively for one group will dissuade others from engaging with it.

Business law should be fair not just between businesses, but also between business and society and between discrete groups of stakeholders. Countries should cooperate with each other with the spirit of encouraging business enterprise, avoiding protectionism and unjustified international sanctions, where possible.

Governments should be ready to step in where it becomes clear that the legitimate exploitation of competitive advantage has become an abuse, and especially so where such activity is coordinated between interests to create an impression of acceptability. Governments themselves must also avoid the temptation to implement rules that discriminate unfairly against businesses from outside their jurisdiction.

Governments should act to break up cartels, because these stifle fair competition in the business environment. That action may be direct, or may involve the implementation of other mechanisms, such as independent non-governmental organisations, to address such undesirable behaviours.

Care should be taken to ensure that the application of uniform codes of law does not disadvantage particular groups. It may well be that elements designed to deal with the affairs of large or complex businesses should be specifically disapplied for smaller businesses for which they have no direct relevance, especially where smaller business may not have the resources to deal with such burdens and society would derive no benefit from them.