Best federal jurisdiction law books according to redditors

A politician believes that some policy is creating a problem population (in this case lax immigration enforcement is causing too many bad people coming up from Latin America and stay here). Politician says as much on the campaign trail, in the kind of emotional and hyperbolic language that is typical in politics, and that is needed for politicians to show supporters they will actually put up a fight on the issue. Politician is elected, uses his rightful constitutional powers to change said policies (actually -- using his executive powers to rescind a policy which itself was of dubious lawfulness). The president decides he is actually going to enforce the law as is, and not give special work dispensations to unauthorized aliens. However -- random judge says that because of emotional language politician used on the campaign trail, particularly language that targeted people from Latin America, the orders he makes are unlawful and blocks the executive order.

If this stands, it is a judicial coup. The logic at work here has nothing to do with interpreting the laws as they were written. Disallowing disparate impact is not a constitutional principle. Presidents not being able to make policy affecting problem populations they don't like is not a constitutional precept. The judge is inventing principles that basically allow a judicial veto of any Republican president executive action involving sex, race, religion, immigration, etc, which goes against progressive values (since in any such scenario the Republican president with a spine can probably be accused of an "ism" based on his campaign statements). The judge is sovereign, the president can only make rules within a narrow box confined by the judges.

Rule by the judges has been a growing phenomena over many decades -- there a few books on it, such as this one -- https://www.amazon.com/Government-Judiciary-Studies-Jurisprudence-Legal/dp/0865971447/ But this takes it to an even greater level.

Some follow-up questions that come to mind: will there be any awareness among Republicans that the system prevents their candidates from actual ruling? Will the system suffer a legitimacy crisis as a result? At what point will the "muh Constitution" people on the right realize their Constitution has been pwned? Will Trump try to Andrew Jackson the judiciary? What would happen if he did?

What if we all decide on a date and then sue in our local small claims courts at the same time? Surely they couldn't fight all of us and there'd be a lot of default judgments, right? Is this legal?

Here's a book that's helpful. It'll give a good overview for anyone else that wants to start researching the specifics of the process. See if your local library has a copy, or find the info online.

https://www.amazon.com/Small-Claims-Court-Without-Lawyer/dp/1601383061/

Edit: Quick math: Even if 0.01% of people affected (1 in 10,000) participated, that'd still be 14,700 small claims suits filed in jurisdictions across the country on the same day. I feel like that'd be exceptionally difficult to fight.

Anyone down for it? Make a subreddit/Facebook group for a date a few months from today?

I'd recommend two books:

1. Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court; and
   
2. A History of the Supreme Court by Bernard Schwartz.
   
   The Schwartz book is particularly good for a history of the development of the Court and its jurisprudence. It may not cover 100 decisions but you get good in-depth treatment of probably 20 or so of the big ones.

Chemerinsky's is widely considered the gold standard in fed courts supplements.

https://www.amazon.com/Federal-Jurisdiction-Sixth-Student-Treatise/dp/1454804025

I just wrote a paper on this for my history of the common law class in law school. The history of the 4th amendment by Cuddihy is pretty much the bible of this topic and I suggest going to the source for a more detailed answer (http://www.amazon.com/The-Fourth-Amendment-Origins-Original/dp/0195367197) but I will try to summarize some of what I read. Basically the English did have concepts of rights to privacy and unlawful search and seizure but the English did not do much with them legally. There were some restrictions on writs of assistance such as a requirement that they be used during the daytime and would only last a certain period of time but the limits ended there. In the colonies Massachusetts was actually unique in starting to really crack down legally on unlimited search and seizure. The fact that they were a colony that did a lot of smuggling had something to do with this but it was not the whole story given that a lot of the New England Colonies smuggled because they were major ports and lacked a staple crop to make most of their money from. I think a factor that was more important and less recognized is their religion. Puritans in Massachusetts were often concerned with being separate from England and having a religion based self government. This made them more prone to resistance than other colonies and it eventually lead to their charter being taken away in 1686. Laws that restricted England's ability to search were just another means of resisting English authority. The colony often conducted very intrusive searches of its own citizens to little complaint but when the British conducted these kinds of searches the local politicians reacted negatively to the usurpation of their authority. They would drum up the outrage of the people and pass laws restricting search. Eventually these laws lead to a legal tradition of mistrust of intrusive searches which snowballed into more and more reforms until Massachusetts called for the specific warrant which became the law there and eventually the requirement for search laid out in the 4th amendment. It is obviously more complicated than that but it is difficult to summarize a 1000 page book in a paragraph. If you have more specific questions I might be able to answer them better.

Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock: Treaty Rights and Indian Law at the End of the Nineteenth Century is an important case personally brought to the Supreme Court in 1903 by a great man from my nation to determine whether an unratified treaty was valid. Result was the Supreme Court clarified that treaties with indian nations are considered meaningless in the eyes of the US government and have no legal standing since indians are imbecilic "wards of the state" and we aren't real nations. This case hasn't been overturned.

American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court : The Masking of Justice covers the Supreme Court's schizophrenic views on Indians, which bear absolutely no similarity to their rulings on non-Indians, are inconsistent, and make no sense other than the general rule is still "Indians lose".

Johnson v. M'Intosh is a critical early case that established that the legal justification for the taking of our lands was the "Doctrine of Discovery", invented by the Catholic Church, which purports that the first christian to set eyes upon land owned by non-christians seizes it permanently for his nation because non-christians are incapable of owning property and are fit only to be slaves or farm animals since Indian claims on land are comparable to a fish claiming to own the ocean (an actual example they use). Still hasn't been overturned and is still being cited as the ruling authority for 21st century cases.

Can't say I've been a guest of the Canadian prison system, but because I'm very loosely involved in the U.S. system I've read two books you might find interesting.

Rock-A-Bye Baby: A Death Behind Bars by Anne Kershaw and Mary Lasovich is a must-read. It's a partial biography of Marlene Moore, Canada's first woman Dangerous Offender - despite the fact that she never hurt anyone besides herself. It's a heartbreaking account of one damaged woman, a survivor of abuse and trauma, who just kept turning in on herself - but the prison system had no idea what to do with her. It's a tough read. I got it from Amazon.

I also read Imprisoning Our Sisters by Stephanie Hayman. It's her doctoral thesis, I believe, so it's academic but not impossible to read (I got through it, which says a lot). It's about the task force created to build a new, more appropriate, healing-based league of prisons for federal women prisoners in Canada. It's a sequel of sorts to Rock-A-Bye Baby. Marlene Moore spent a lot of time in the Prison for Women in Kingston, ON, which was apparently a real hellhole. This task force was put together to figure out what to do after P4W was shuttered.

Edited for links

This is the latest edition (including the December changes) of the FRCP for $20.

If you don't want to spring for it though, we had the Lexis reps at my school give out free pocket-sized ones that had both the old rules and the updated changes. Maybe ask your Lexis rep?

Socialism is flawed at its very core; it is rooted in coercion and an all-powerful state apparatus. I strongly recommend reading "The Law" by Frédéric Bastiat. It's very short (like 60 pages IIRC) and thought-provoking.

Edit: Also, if you are interested in socialism in practice (like a "case study") I would definitely look into some books about China from 1920 to 1990. The eyewitness accounts from the 1950s are especially damning of what socialism is like in reality.

it's $0.99 for the kindle version

Sounds like a good way to get a protective order issued against you.

In other news, I found this when I googled who Jeff Flake was, and it's too good not to share

Thank you Roger!
Here are the Audiobooks available on Amazon:
Murray N. Rothbard
Conceived in Liberty
A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market
For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto
America's Great Depression
Henry Hazlitt
Economics in One Lesson
Frederick Bastiat
The Law
F. A. Hayek
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
The Constitution of Liberty
David Boaz
Libertarianism: A Primer
Ludwig von Mises
Human Action: A Treatise on Economics
Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis
The Theory of Money and Credit
Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition
Friedrich Engels
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Karl Marx
The Communist Manifesto
Milton Friedman
Free to Choose: A Personal Statement
Capitalism and Freedom
Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary History
John Maynard Keynes
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
Robert T. Kiyosaki
Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!

Gun Control on Trial by Brian Doherty has interviews with the team that took Heller. It's generally a good read in case you have a hobby in 2nd Amendment case law like I do.

The Heller team speculated that Dellinger did a 180 on the self-defense exception because Kennedy had said he supported an individual right at the beginning of orals. DC's was in a losing position, so Dellinger tried to offer the self-defense exemption in order to save the handgun ban. Or Dellinger could have not have read the briefs and just Leeroy Jenkins'd oral arguments.

You can actually listen to oral arguments yourself at Oyez. I'll copy the relevant parts here:

Justice Alito asked:

> But even if you have... even if you have a rifle or a shotgun in your home, doesn't the code prevent you from loading it and unlocking it except when it's being used for lawful, recreational purposes within the District of Columbia?

> So even if you have the gun, under this code provision it doesn't seem as if you could use it for the defense of your home.

Walter Dellinger, the counsel for DC, replied:

> --That is not the city's position, and we have no dispute with the other side on the point of what the right answer should be.

> It is a universal or near universal rule of criminal law that there is a self-defense exception.

> It goes without saying.

> We have no argument whatsoever with the notion that you may load and have a weapon ready when you need to use it for self-defense.

Later, when its Alan Gura's turn, the very first thing he does is call out DC for trying to pull a fast one:

> I'd like to respond to the point about the... the District of Columbia's position over the years with respect to the functional firearms ban.

> The Petitioners have had two opportunities to urge courts to adopt this so-called self-defense exception which they construed in the amendment.

> The first opportunity came in 1978 in McIntosh versus Washington, where the petitioners urged the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia to uphold the law because it was irrational in their view to prohibit self-defense in the home with firearms.

> They deemed it to be too dangerous, and this was a legitimate policy choice of the City Council, and they actually prevailed in that view.

> The second opportunity that the Petitioners had to urge this sort of self-defense construction was actually in this case in the district court.

> We had a motion for summary judgment and we made certain factual allegations in this motion, and on page 70a of the joint appendix we see portions of our statement of undisputed material facts.

> Fact number 29, which was conceded by the District of Columbia, reads: The defendants prohibit the possession of lawfully owned firearms for self-defense within the home, even in instances when self-defense would be lawful by other means under District of Columbia law.

> The citation for that is a functional firearms ban, and that point was conceded.

I consider myself pretty nationalistic and I personally don't have a problem with "thank the troops" or the other pregame ceremonies like flyovers, that you get at sporting events. That said, it's pretty obvious and what I thought was common knowledge that it's essentially a payed advertisement for the military. It's okay, we can call it what it is and still be proud of the men and women in uniform.

>In the years following 9/11, professional sports took a healing gesture and transformed it into a way to make money. In 2015, Republican Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake released the report “Tackling Paid Patriotism,” which criticized the deceptive, taxpayer-funded contracts between the Pentagon and virtually every pro sports league. - Howard Bryant/WBUR

The book itself even mentions my local soccer team, LA Galaxy. But we see this in every sport in America.

I think so, but saying something like that out loud really raises eyebrows. Read this and this (it doesn't cover citizen's united, but still supposed to be pretty good). Mostly, the lobbyists pick the candidates they are pretty sure will vote their way ahead of time and just don't fund them again if it doesn't work out.

I would highly recommend reading, a lot. Start with Tenny Davis, and go from there.

https://www.amazon.com/Chemistry-Powder-Explosives-Tenney-Davis/dp/0913022004

Also, expand your understanding of the laws surrounding making ANY explosives.

https://www.amazon.com/ATF-Federal-Explosives-Law-Regulations/dp/1601704755

You can call the local ATF office and they will send you one of the Orange Books.

If you want to understand originalism as a way of interpreting the US Constitution, I suggest you read anything by Raoul Berger - probably the first originalism scholar. A good place to start is Government by Judiciary