In this groundbreaking book, Scalia and Garner systematically explain all the most important principles of constitutional, statutory, and contractual interpretation in an engaging and informative style with hundreds of illustrations from actual cases. Is a burrito a sandwich? Is a corporation entitled to personal privacy? If you trade a gun for drugs, are you using a gun in a drug transaction? The authors grapple with these and dozens of equally curious questions while explaining the most principled, lucid, and reliable techniques for deriving meaning from authoritative texts. Meanwhile, the book takes up some of the most controversial issues in modern jurisprudence. What, exactly, is textualism? Why is strict construction a bad thing? What is the true doctrine of originalism? And which is more important: the spirit of the law, or the letter? The authors write with a well-argued point of view that is definitive yet nuanced, straightforward yet sophisticated.
Written by respected scholars and experienced educators, this book showcases rules and doctrine of civil procedure at work in the practice of law. The book focuses on civil rights both to engage student’s by focusing on issues they care out and to illustrate the impact of procedure on real people’s experience with the legal system. The cases are framed in their historical and social context. Each chapter contains a well-written introduction, cases, and clear explanations of the doctrine, supported by readings highlighting the context of the case as well as review questions and comments which deepen students’ understanding and clarify key concepts, and offers more than forty well-crafted problems (both for class use and review), to help students solidify their understanding of the materials whether used in class or as out-of-class assignments. In-class exercises and simulations based on a sample case file are integrated throughout. Pleadings, memoranda, transcripts, exhibits, motions, and more – all taken from a real case – appear in the Appendix. Civil Procedure: Doctrine, Practice, and Context consistently emphasizes the skills and values of lawyering as it offers a consideration of social responsibility. New to the 7th Edition: The inclusion of more examples and problem sets to make the materials more accessible and the concepts more concrete The addition of more practice exercises, with a focus on one set of Case Files throughout the book, rather than the two that were used in prior editions With the removal of Warner v. City of New York case files (because most professors did not have time to use the Warner case files into their courses), issues that are unique to public law litigation are woven throughout the book with practice problems, examples, comments, and questions. This revision will make it easier for professors to incorporate these issues into the course. Professors and students will benefit from: Practice exercises allow students to learn by doing – integrating doctrine, practice, and context. These exercises can be covered in class or, instead, recommended as content for study groups. Topics that are especially hard to teach (like discovery) and those that require a lot of time to teach have been rewritten to respond to adopters’ requests. A case file involving a car accident that is both accessible to first year students and provides good teaching tools for procedure professors to show how a case is litigated from complaint through trial. Because the case file involves a relatively simple state court case, it provides an opportunity to compare state and federal procedural regimes. Review questions focus on student comprehension; broader critical questions are separated out in “questions to ponder” sections. Questions are answered in the teacher’s manual. Background material has been integrated to promote critical thinking and engage students with the latest debates over civil procedure. New practice problems promote engagement with cutting edge issues like Multidistrict Litigation. The authors are developing an online community for adopters – in addition to the teacher’s manual -- to help better facilitate the learning and teaching process for this book.
The Formation of English Common Law provides a comprehensive overview of the development of early English law, one of the classic subjects of medieval history. This much expanded second edition spans the centuries from King Alfred to Magna Carta, abandoning the traditional but restrictive break at the Norman Conquest. Within a strong interpretative framework, it also integrates legal developments with wider changes in the thought, society, and politics of the time. Rather than simply tracing elements of the common law back to their Anglo-Saxon, Norman or other origins, John Hudson examines and analyses the emergence of the common law from the interaction of various elements that developed over time, such as the powerful royal government inherited from Anglo-Saxon England and land holding customs arising from the Norman Conquest. Containing a new chapter charting the Anglo-Saxon period, as well as a fully revised Further Reading section, this new edition is an authoritative yet highly accessible introduction to the formation of the English common law and is ideal for students of history and law.
New York Times Bestseller • Notable Book of the Year • Editors' Choice Selection One of Bill Gates’ “Amazing Books” of the Year One of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Best Books of the Year Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction An NPR Best Book of the Year Winner of the Hillman Prize for Nonfiction Gold Winner • California Book Award (Nonfiction) Finalist • Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History) Finalist • Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize This “powerful and disturbing history” exposes how American governments deliberately imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas nationwide (New York Times Book Review). Widely heralded as a “masterful” (Washington Post) and “essential” (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law offers “the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation” (William Julius Wilson). Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. A groundbreaking, “virtually indispensable” study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history (Chicago Daily Observer), The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.
Reprint of the sole edition. "This is an important, erudite, and difficult book. The author, who is of the school of institutional economists, has undertaken to analyze 'the structure only of that particular social organization and institution which is called property', not merely in its legal aspects but also with respect to the underlying economic facts of the institution today. (...) Those who will make the effort requisite to an understanding of this book will be well repaid.": Sidney Post Simpson, Harvard Law Review 49 (1935-36) 1211-16.