American Law in a Global Context: The Basics, now in a thoroughly revised edition, is an elegant and erudite introduction to the American legal system from a global perspective. Drawing on some comparative examples with a focus on American law, George P. Fletcher, Hoi L. Kong, and Steve Sheppard introduce underlying principles of common and civil law, constitutional, criminal, and public law, and property and procedure. The appendices include an introduction to the common law method, instruction on how to read a case, the interpretation of statutes, and an introduction to the Federal system and US courts systems. This revised edition offers a greater focus on American law itself and includes the addition of an easy-to-use Bibliography as well as a new Civil Procedure Appendix.
Fletcher, Kong, and Sheppard provide a clear roadmap through essential areas of US law with in-depth analyses of well-known cases. These cases allow readers the opportunity to examine not only law as theory but as practice, while guiding them to further exploration through suggested readings.
A must-own reference source for LLM students, undergraduates, and students of US law in other countries.
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.
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 & Brief a Case
Appendix II The Civil Trial in Outline
Appendix III Civ-Pro Snap - A Review of the Civil Trial
Bibliography
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.
