This book addresses three major questions about law and legal systems: (1) What are the defining and organising forms of legal institutions, legal rules, interpretative methodologies, and other legal phenomena? (2) How does frontal and systematic focus on these forms advance understanding of such phenomena? (3) What credit should the functions of forms have when such phenomena serve policy and related purposes, rule of law values, and fundamental political values such as democracy, liberty, and justice? This book seeks to offer general answers to these questions and thus gives form in the law its due. The answers not only provide articulate conversancy with the subject but also reveal insights into the nature of law itself, the oldest and foremost problem in legal theory and allied subjects.

"This book discusses developments in scholarship dedicated to reinvigorating the study of the broad domain of private law. This field, which embraces the traditional common law subjects-property, contracts, and torts-as well as adjacent, more statutory areas, such as intellectual property and commercial law, also includes important subjects that have been neglected in the United States but are beginning to make a comeback. The book particularly focuses on the New Private Law, an approach that aims to bring a new outlook to the study of private law by moving beyond reductively instrumentalist policy evaluation and narrow, rule-by-rule, doctrine-by-doctrine analysis, so as to consider and capture how private law's various features fit and work together, as well as the normative underpinnings of these larger structures. This movement is resuscitating the notion of private law itself in United States and has brought an interdisciplinary perspective to the more traditional, doctrinal approach prevalent in Commonwealth countries. The book embraces a broad range of perspectives to private law-including philosophical, economic, historical, and psychological- yet it offers a unifying theme of seriousness about the structure and content of private law."--

The Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an up-to-date resource for information on legal ethics. Federal, state and local courts in all jurisdictions look to the Rules for guidance in solving lawyer malpractice cases, disciplinary actions, disqualification issues, sanctions questions and much more. In this volume, black-letter Rules of Professional Conduct are followed by numbered Comments that explain each Rule's purpose and provide suggestions for its practical application. The Rules will help you identify proper conduct in a variety of given situations, review those instances where discretionary action is possible, and define the nature of the relationship between you and your clients, colleagues and the courts.

The book provides an overview of American legal institutions and sources of law, and presents a guide to the interrelationships between and among those institutions and legal authorities. It discusses the defining role of the doctrine of stare decisis in the American common law system and the critical judicial review function. In addition, American Legal Systems shows the reader how to determine and apply the relative priorities of sources of law, all in the context of the legislative process, agency action, and principles of constitutional and legislative supremacy. American Legal Systems ties many of these concepts to the realities of law practice. Portions of the book demonstrate how to locate specific resources, use legal terms, and prepare commonplace legal documents. Among the main virtues of the book is its reader-friendliness. It introduces readers to some extremely complicated issues of American jurisprudence in a clear and straightforward way. It is relatively short and concise, much of it in chart form, allowing the user to quickly find and assimilate sought-after information. American Legal Systems can be used for reference purposes in conjunction with a student's substantive course work, or it could be used in connection with an experiential task, such as legal research and writing. Of course, it can also be read on its own.

"Project of the American Bar Association, Criminal Justice Standards Committee, Criminal Justice Section"--T.p. verso.

The title of the book is taken from Hegel and refers to the idea that philosophy cannot be prescriptive because it understands only in hindsight. The same holds true for conceptions of human rights. Based on his many years of experience in the field, the author shares his thoughts about human rights and the role it plays in society. In these thought-provoking essays, the author examines the dialectic relationship between rule of law and law and order; between state and individual; judicial power of logic vs executive logic of power. These dynamic contradictions are never resolved. On the contrary, they are the motor of development and inspire judicial reasoning and the balancing of justice vis--vis power and arbitrariness.