Best courts & law books according to redditors
We found 51 Reddit comments discussing the best courts & law books. We ranked the 12 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 51 Reddit comments discussing the best courts & law books. We ranked the 12 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
I think part of the problem is really that people are looking at only granular parts of problems today and don't have enough historical context. Its useless to follow every story about everyone and every little thing. There are lots of ups and downs in politics and there's no reason to be so reactionary to every single new and probably manufactured "scandal".... that's what's exhausting. I like to keep updated on a few big issues, I follow the careers of a few people I find inspiring (and follow a few that do things that worry me), and spend the rest of the time reading up on topics in book form... they have the advantage of being written over time, and with more vigorous standards for accuracy. The news, while still important where immediate info is necessary, is essentially click bait now. You don't need to get caught in the rip tides that pull you everywhere constantly, just understand the general trajectory of the important things.
edit: to those curious about some book recommendations: I'm by no means an expert in anything really, and the books you read should really be about the topics you personally are interested in, so don't take my word as gospel (or any author's). I like American history, ancient history, international relations, and though I think they're more boring I force myself to read about the health care system and the American education system because I feel they're important. I'm also looking to read some books on the military industrial complex and cyber security/ big data because I don't really know anything about them other than the stuff I see in passing on the news or here on Reddit. So if anyone knows a good overview of those issues, feel free to let me know.
This is just some stuff I've listed off the top of my head. Another thing that I find helpful to better understanding intl relations are books about the major genocides of the past few decades, which are hard to get through (because of the brutal content) but... What is the What (Sudan), First they killed my father (Cambodian genocide), Girl at War (more of a autobiography, but still chilling) there's a couple of others I've read that I can't remember now.
Anyway, just go to Good Reads and look at Contemporary Politics. Perhaps Great Courses has a political philosophy course too that you can draw from if you wanna go even farther back into the origins of society's structure and political thought.
Also podcasts! I've just discovered these but there's a lot of audio content (FREE!) that you can listen to on your commute and whatnot. I like Abe Lincoln's Top Hat right now.
Edit edit: wow thanks for the gold!!
They absolutely should have rejected it. It is very clear that the majority (Rehnquist, O'Connor, Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas) were acting more on behalf of their Republican partisanship than coherent judicial philosophy.
Now, Scalia, Thomas and Rehnquist were always going to be for Bush. The real question were the four moderates, O'Connor, Kennedy, Souter, and Breyer. All of these moderates, except Breyer, were Republican, and had been appointed by a Republican President. By this time, Kennedy and O'Connor tended to be more conservative than not, Souter and Breyer more liberal than not. O'Connor was the swing vote on nearly all 5-4 cases, but she was in the end a conservative who tried to tailor the court's opinions to be narrow rulings in line with public opinion.
One of the lawyers who worked in Anthony Kennedy's was so sure that certiorari would be denied he didn't even bring a legal pad when Kennedy summoned him to talk about the case.
>The legal basis for Bush’s position was incidental and rather weak. The principal argument concerned the obscure provision of Article II in the Constitution that provides that each state shall choose electors “in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct.” The Republicans said that it was now the Florida [Supreme Court]—and not the legislature—that was “directing” how Florida chose the winner of the state’s electoral votes. The sole authority for this claim was a nearly incomprehensible opinion of the Court from 1892. (The Florida court had disposed of this article II argument by saying that it was simply doing what courts always do—interpreting Florida election law, not making it. Almost as a throwaway, the Bush team added another claim—that the recounts violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Their casual attention to this argument—just three pages in a forty-two page brief—was understandable. The Supreme Court, in granting cert in the Palm Beach case, had thought the equal protection argument was so weak that it refused even to hear argument on the issue.
Originally, Rehnquist was going to rule in favor of Bush on the Article II grounds, but Kennedy preferred the Equal Protection Clause. Since Rehnquist needed Kennedy for a majority, he got his way.
>The problem with Kennedy’s analysis, as innumerable commentators subsequently pointed out, was that no court, much less the Supreme Court, had ever before imposed any kind of constitutional rule of uniformity in the counting of ballots. Most states, including Florida, used different voting technologies in a single election. Kennedy was right that the recount might have produced inconsistencies and anomalies. But he was wrong on the larger, far more important point. A recount would have been more accurate than the certified total. The court’s opinion preserved and endorsed a less fair, and less accurate, count of the votes.
O'Connor thought that Kennedy's logic was flawed, but she didn't want a broad ruling that mandated new, uniform election laws.
>Kennedy responded by adding what become the most notorious sentence in the opinion—indeed, a single sentence that summed up so much of what was wrong with what the Court did. “Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances,” Kennedy wrote, “for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities.”
>In other words, the opinion did not reflect any general legal principles; rather the Court was acting only to assist a single individual—George W. Bush.
So the conservative majority essentially said that continuing the recount amounted to irreparable harm to Bush behalf of the Equal Protection clause, since the recount practices were not standardized, and issued a stay, stopping the recount. This need not have happened:
>Breyer had a simple solution: remand the case back to the Florida Supreme Court, order those justices to set a clear standard for the whole state, and the recount the votes. Breyer loved compromise—and he thought this was a good one.
Stevens was very much on the ball with his dissent that pointed out that recounting votes in no way amounted to irreparable harm. Souter was heartbroken by the case, and considered resigning over the crudely partisan way in which the Court took up and decided the case. O'Connor permanently stained her reputation of trying to tailor to public opinion (Gore had won more votes from Americans than any other candidate up to this point, excepting Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide). But O'Connor's Republican partisanship overrode that in Bush v. Gore (many forget that she was the Republican Senate Majority Leader in Arizona back in the day). O'Connor (and even Kennedy) ended up moving to the left after Bush v. Gore (they were very much in disagreement with how the Bush Administration legally conducted the War on Terror).
Today, the Justices on the case try very much not to talk much about the decision (even Scalia, the most gleefully partisan Republican on the Court), and O'Connor recently publicly stated that
>“Maybe the Court should have said, ‘We’re not going to take it, goodbye.’ ”
The quotes come from Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.
Now that is good. For $11 I’ll give it a go.
https://www.amazon.com/Nine-Inside-Secret-World-Supreme/dp/1400096790
Surprisingly more expensive on kindle, so paperback it is. Looks like a decent book. Thanks man!
I just finished The Nine Old Men that details FDR's huge fights with the Supreme Court, including him ignoring injunctions for the WPA and basically saying "Now there's a million dudes who work because of this program you're about to rule on. If you kill it, I'll give them your address and let them know exactly who's responsible"
You are taking the word supreme literally. It's not infallible. Yet people listen to it as it is bound by the existing law of the land at that point in time. The same arguments need hold good when Taj gets demolished next.
Quote by George Orwell:
The truth was erased, the erasure forgotten, then became the lie, truth
Refer to the comment of previous CJI JS Verma. There is a book too:
Supreme But Not Infallible: Essays in Honour of the Supreme Court of India
https://www.amazon.in/dp/0195653793/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_ZJ.XDbH2KQKHD
OH MY GOD I have been waiting for this post!!!!
Best legal writing book I have ever seen is: Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges -- By Antonin (SCOTUS Justice) Scalia and Brian Garner.
It is AMAZING.
Here is the link: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Your-Case-Persuading-Judges/dp/0314184716/ref=asc_df_0314184716/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312142542416&hvpos=1o4&hvnetw=g&hvrand=8044996114739830784&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9021716&hvtargid=pla-489109186761&psc=1
>What about readings like The Federalist Papers
Don't be that guy. Seriously.
What about his book of rants publishing emails from his Seventh Circuit colleagues without their permission?
Because it's completely wrong. They did not follow normal parliamentary procedure. Period. It was rigged. The videos show this to be true.
Are you in law school? You don't have any flair.
Err... I would not send people off reading judicial opinions. Brian Gardner and Scalia have a pretty good book on legal writing. But really, I'd just tell Robotrick to IRAC or CREAC if his writing is weak.
IRAC = Issue, Rule, Analysis, Conclusion and is used for objective writing.
CREAC = Contention, Rule, Example (if you have any. For legal writing these are cases - not sure this would translate too well for non-legal writing), Analysis, Conclusion and is used for persuasive writing.
It's a simple way to break down what you want to talk about. That said, it's not very pretty. It's mainly used so someone who doesn't want to sift through endless BS can quickly figure out WTF you're trying to say because they have a roadmap in their head for what you're doing.
Don't worry about it too much. You can keep IRAC in the back of your head until you're in your LRW class - then do whatever your prof tells you to do.
Seconding those, and I'd also suggest William Rehnquist's history of the court. It's less of what you're looking for than the books VIJoe suggested, but it provides some interesting contexts and gives a clearer idea of the nitty-gritty of how the court works than most anything else. For obvious reasons, it doesn't cover much in the way of specific cases during his tenure on the court, and has a few problems with bias but it's an interesting read nonetheless. (If you want a good supplement for much of the Rehnquist era, Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine is an entertaining read that gives good context. Some of it should be taken with a grain of salt, but it's worth a glance.)
I haven't read it yet and can't speak to how well it fits the OP's criteria, but I hear very good things about John Paul Stevens's recently-published memoir.
If you want to go really in-depth and particularly technical with this sort of thing, I'd recommend picking up a few of the Examples & Explanations books that law students use as study aids. They're a hell of a lot more dry than any of these recommendations, and they'll include a wider range of cases than you're looking for, but you might find them interesting.
However, note that important legal cases that lead to serious revisions of legal principles are often more boring than painting grass and watching it dry as it grows.
If you're in litigation, I've seen this mentioned frequently.
Well, Epstein and Knight, who literally wrote the book on how the Supreme Court makes decisions, disagree with him.
Well, I would highly recommend renting some textbooks on American politics, American political history, and American political theory. Perhaps start here and work your way up: http://www.amazon.com/Logic-American-Politics-Samuel-Kernell/dp/1568028911
If you find textbooks too dull, then here is a good list of books to get you started:
http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Federalist-Anti-Federalist-Papers/dp/1495446697/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1453181599&sr=1-1&keywords=federalist+and+anti-federalist+papers
http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-America-Penguin-Classics-Tocqueville/dp/0140447601
http://www.amazon.com/The-Ideological-Origins-American-Revolution/dp/0674443020
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Reconstruction-America-1860-1880-Burghardt/dp/0684856573
http://www.amazon.com/The-Nine-Inside-Secret-Supreme/dp/1400096790
http://www.amazon.com/Congress-Electoral-Connection-Second-Edition/dp/0300105878
http://www.amazon.com/What-Should-Know-About-Politics/dp/1611452996
http://www.amazon.com/The-Race-between-Education-Technology/dp/0674035305
http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/1491534656
*If you actually take the time to read these, you will be better informed than 99 percent of the voting public. <-- And after you read these, that sentence will terrify you because you will realize each of these books is just an introduction, and the world is being run by technocrats. JK, but not really.
Edit: But really.
For appellate writing:
http://www.amazon.com/Making-Your-Case-Persuading-Judges/dp/0314184716/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0
Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:
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amazon.com.au
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amazon.es
amazon.com.br
amazon.nl
amazon.co.jp
amazon.fr
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Manhunt by Peter Bergen is about the ten-year hunt for Osama bin Laden by the United States government, written by the only Western journalist to ever interview OBL. It's hard to find someone involved in the hunt whom he didn't interview, and the result is fantastically fair and even-handed.
If you're looking at something a bit more big-picture, The Art of Intelligence by Henry Crumpton is a solid overview of modern intelligence operations as framed by his career. It's not for cynics, but it's a good read nonetheless.
I also went on a Supreme Court-related kick this summer after the Obamacare decision. The definitive look at how the Supreme Court functions comes courtesy of Bob Woodward's The Brethren. He wrote it 25ish years ago with Supreme Court insiders (including a former Justice) as sources. The subject matter is a little historical (he covers the Burger court from 1969 to 1975) and at times a little technical (I'm a SCOTUS dork and even I had to look a few things up) but if you're interested in how the Court actually works, it's essential reading. I highly recommend the chapter on the 1973 term - Woodward devotes at least 50+ pages to their ruling in United States v. Nixon (the Watergate case) with a blow-by-blow account of Watergate from the Supreme Court's perspective. If you're a constitutional dork like me, it's both heartening and heart-pounding.
For a more recent perspective on the Supreme Court, Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine is worth checking out. He writes about the Rehnquist Court from about 1992 to 2006, and while it's neither as well-written nor as neutral as Woodward's book, it's still pretty insightful about the current Court's jurisprudential disposition.
Absolutely. Here are a few of my faves and I'm tagging /u/laMuerte5 as he/she was interested in the podcast part.
Books (none of these are affiliate links and i'm going to try and get the formatting right):
The Nine This covers Reagan era through GW era Justices.
The Brethren covers Nixon and Ford Justices
The Supreme Court I haven't read this one but it is on my list. Although it is a textbook, I have heard that it is an easy read.
The Everything American Government Book I actually bought this for a secret santa exchange and after flipping through it, I ended up buying a Kindle copy for myself. This is great for a general overview and is way better than the For Dummies books on politics.
Podcasts:
First Mondays covers the Supreme Court well. There is another podcast called Supreme Podcast but they haven't updated since March.
John Dickerson has a really cool podcast on political campaigns called Slates Whistlestop
My History Can Beat Up Your Politics combines current events to history. It's really worth checking out.
Introduction to American Politics. I haven't checked this one out but it seems like a good one for an overview.
Also consider Scalia's Making Your Case, which also includes sections on oral argument.
The Five Types of Legal Argument is a good primer on what types of arguments are used in the courts that generate case law. Chemerinsky's Constitutional Law is an excellent resource for constitutional law, which is some of the more interesting stuff. The Nine is an easy read and a good introduction to the personalities and major decisions of the Rehnquist court and early Roberts court. Dressler's Understanding Criminal Law is another good one; it explains the general architecture of criminal law and its development. Those might be available at libraries near you. If there's a law library in your area, you can always grab a legal encyclopedia (like American Jurisprudence 2d. or Corpus Juris Secondum) and a Black's Law Dictionary and flip around until you find something interesting. And as others have mentioned, BarBri is a good resource.
Thanks! (he said hoping that you weren't being sarcastic)
Yeah if you're interested in critical responses to the legal formalist model (which is the model that says that law should be this rationally consistent system of principles that can be merely applied by judges--pretty much the basic thing you learn in civics class) I can suggest reading Sociological Jurisprudence and the Legal Realist critiques as a starting point because they are pretty well known (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Roscoe Pound for the former, Karl Llewellyn and Jerome Frank for the latter).
Then maybe you want to look at some of the Critical Legal Studies movement, which basically says that the law is a social tool used to systematically disadvantage certain groups in society--women, people of color, homosexuals, etc--while maintaining the illusion of moral superiority by hiding behind the idea that "the law" is this perfect, reasonable system divorced from political and social concerns. Though while I see their arguments' value I find CLS either incredibly dull and repetitive or upsettingly polemic and inflammatory.
I find the most compelling work to be the relatively new field of Judicial Politics though, since it kind of brings social science tools (like behavioral models) to bear on the judiciary. The seminal model here is definitely Segel and Spaeth although there has been some movement since then obviously. Basically this says that judges decide how to vote based on their policy preferences, just like Congressman decide how to vote based on their policy preferences, and then just come up with a legal reason (not necessarily consciously so, but you can tell a lot more about how a Supreme Court Justice will behave in the future by looking at their policy preferences than by looking at their legal opinions). Not that there aren't plenty of problems in this field (like I said, the Formalist Model was so dominant for so long that people really haven't been studying the judiciary in a social scientific way for very long) but I think that everyone who is at all interested in either Law or Public Policy needs to read at least some of their work.
Sorry for the massive reading list, but I figured you rarely get the opportunity to actually change someone's mind on the internet!
To go in a direction other than the "don't go to lawl school!!!!" and super-serious commenters, if you want something accessible to give you some exposure to legal issues, I would absolutely recommend The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin. It's an easy read and a good mix of law and institutional politics.
Pick up a copy of Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges. Some guy named Scalia wrote it.
Books specifically about the supreme Court or books written by supreme court justices? I would recommend http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0314184716?pc_redir=1404103002&amp;robot_redir=1
Its a great desktop reference
A book.
I should always be working on my dissertation, I feel, but that's not always possible. Subtle difference.
As for reading? The go-to books are Segal and Spaeth, Epstein and Knight, and for a bonus, Maltzman, Spriggs, and Wahlbeck. Also, take a gander at Esptein's CV or any of the authors listed. They sometimes have accessible (re: free) articles. Epstein's CV also includes access to the Judicial Common Space scores, which are ideology scores for the Supreme Court.
As for what I want to be researching? Legitimacy, without a doubt. The globalization of law. Law as a recolonizing tool. Comparative constitutional structures. Symbols of law in pop culture. There are a myriad of things that interest me with several common themes.
I would recommend brushing up on American History. That was the one thing I played catch-up on. It’s amazing how much it helps when reading cases. The historical context and political climate will often help you make sense of a ruling that otherwise seems completely arbitrary. I spent much of my “free” time reading books about historical events and found it to be very helpful. If you want books that are law related, but not necessarily about law, I loved The Nine and Ivy Briefs. Don't worry too much about knowing legal stuff beforehand, you don't want to start school burnt out and stressed out, let your professors take care of that for you.
damn, you got a good deal on old stock!
https://smile.amazon.com/Heller-Case-Gun-Rights-Affirmed/dp/188963221X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1501279515&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=the+heller+case+gun+rights+affirmed
I was just thinking about that, too. It's crazy how many 5-4 decisions. Jeffery Toobin talks a little about it in his book The Nine a good read if this kind of thing interests you.
I really enjoyed The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin
If you want to veer off into the workings of the Supreme Court (a crazy bunch of individuals), there are some great nonfiction books. Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine looks at the dynamics of the Court from the Reagan administration on. Jeff Shesol's Supreme Power is about FDR's plan to pack the Court when they kept ruling his New Deal laws as unconstitutional. FDR is kind of a badass.
I searched the name of the book you recommended but couldn't find it. Do you know the authors name?
Wait are those 3 different books?
Edit: Yea I am dumb they are different books. Here they are on amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Justice-Education-Americas-Struggle/dp/1400030617
https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Young-Lawyer-Mentoring-Paperback/dp/0465016332
https://www.amazon.com/Civil-Action-Jonathan-Harr/dp/0679772677
https://www.amazon.com/Nine-Inside-Secret-World-Supreme/dp/1400096790