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American Law in Global Context provides an overview of US law, focusing on subject areas that make the American legal system distinctive. This introductory text serves as a comprehensive and accessible guide to American legal structure, history, and theory for students of law and lawyers outside the US. The authors provide in-depth analyses of well-known cases to illustrate US law theory as well as practice.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Common Law
- Chapter 2 Legal Reasoning
- Chapter 3 Multiple Common Laws
- Chapter 4 Statutory Interpretation
- Part II Theory of the Common Law - Liberalism and Its Alternatives
- Chapter 5 Property - The Common Law as an Echo of History
- Chapter 6 Common Law, Property, and the Flexibility of Equity
- Chapter 7 Foundations of Tort Law
- Chapter 8 From Contributory to Comparative Fault
- Chapter 9 Contract Law
- Chapter 10 Contractual Harm-Breach of Contract and Harm
- Chapter 11 Property and Public Power
- Chapter 12 Frontiers of Property
- Chapter 13 Economic Efficiency
- Part III Constitutional Beginnings
- Chapter 14 Judicial Review
- Chapter 15 Federalism
- Chapter 16 Judicial Federalism
- Chapter 17 The Meanings of Equality
- Chapter 18 Religious Freedom
- Chapter 19 Free Speech
- Chapter 20 Substantive Due Process
- Chapter 21 Due Process and Incorporation
- Part IV Criminal Process and Criminal Law
- Chapter 22 The American Criminal Process Part I
- Chapter 23 The American Criminal Process Part II
- Chapter 24 The American Criminal Process Part III
- Chapter 25 Criminal Law: The Example of Self-Defense
- Conclusion
- Appendix I How to Read and Brief a Case
- Appendix II The Civil Trial in Outline
- Appendix III Civ-Pro Snap - A Review of the Civil Trial
- Bibliography
About the author
George P. Fletcher, Cardozo Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia Law School, is one of the world's best known scholars of international and comparative criminal law. Fletcher's 20 books, over 150 scholarly articles, and dozens of lectures around the globe have created and redefined many concepts in criminal law and international law. As a lawyer, his US Supreme Court brief in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld convinced the majority that the case should be in Guantanamo but in civilian federal court, and as a young professor , his research and analysis, in a team led by Nuremburg prosecutor Telford Taylor, assisted Jewish emigres escaping the Soviet Union.
Hoi L. Kong is the The Rt. Hon. Beverley McLachlin, P.C., UBC Professor in Constitutional Law at the University of British Columbia's Peter A. Allard School of Law. He is also a Fellow of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation and Senior Research Fellow at University of Texas at Austin's Program on Constitutional Studies. Before joining the
University of British Columbia, he was an Associate Professor at McGill University's Faculty of Law, where he served a term as Associate Dean (Academic). At the outset of his legal career, he was a law clerk to Justice L'Heureux-Dubé and Justice Deschamps at the Supreme Court of Canada.
Steve Sheppard, Dean Emeritus of St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio, is a practitioner-scholar whose research at the intersection of legal history and legal philosophy has long informed his integration of fundamental ideas into understandable and useful tools for students and lawyers. Editor of essential books of the common law by Coke, Selden, Blackstone, Jones, Lieber, Llewellyn, and Farnsworth, and author of the new edition of Bouvier's Law Dictionary, in 2016, Sheppard's scholarship on legal education and the legal profession led him to chair the Texas Supreme Court's review of the Texas Bar Exam.
