In the high-pressure worlds of business and law, good people all too often do bad things, in part because of what some experts call a "toxic" corporate culture.

A new course for Johnson School and Cornell Law School students explores how corporate culture can induce even the best-intentioned employee to do wrong.

The half-semester course, Ethics and Corporate Culture, begins March 9 and is taught by Johnson School senior lecturer Dana Radcliff and law professor Brad Wendel.

The course seeks to help MBA and law students understand how a firm's culture can tempt -- or push -- employees into unethical behavior. The course also will offer strategies for dealing with ethical challenges posed by a problematic corporate culture.

Since managers and attorneys frequently work together, team projects will require collaboration between the MBA and law students, as they bring both business and legal perspectives to bear on tough ethical issues. Class sessions include discussion of case studies and articles reporting on relevant research in organizational behavior, as well as talks by noted guest speakers from the fields of business and law.

Sessions with guest speakers are free and open to the public and will take place in B09 Sage Hall from 4:25 to 5:40 p.m. They are:

• March 11, Frank Raiter, a managing director and head of residential mortgage-backed securities ratings at Standard and Poor's from 1995 to 2005. Raiter was responsible for directing ratings criteria development, ratings production, marketing and business development for single-family mortgage and home equity loan bond ratings and related products. He testified before Congress in October 2008 about the role the rating agencies performed in the residential mortgage market.
• April 18, Milton Regan, professor of law and co-director of the Center for the Study of the Legal Profession at Georgetown University, and author of the 2004 book "Eat What You Kill: The Fall of a Wall Street Lawyer."
• April 22, former Harvard Business School professor Barbara Toffler, this year's Day Family Ethics lecturer, who worked at Arthur Andersen as a partner to develop consulting services in ethics and responsible business practices. She left the firm because of concerns about bad accounting practices, which are now common knowledge.