Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18529 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-13
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1574 pages

Customer Reviews

Best Law Book Around
This book is the best law book that I have ever read. The cases are interesting and well abbreviated. The best part though - the notes before and after the cases. Chemerinsky does a great job of explaining what is going on. Instead of giving you ambiguous answers and rhetorical questions, this book actually explains the law.

I will buy the next edition when it comes out, even though I will be out of law school. That's how good it is. This book should be standard at all schools, and should be the model for legal education text.

A Compelling Interest
Mr. Chemrinsky is surely one of the leaders in the education of constitutional law, and his casebook is well tailored for the beginning law school student. Instead of trying to impress other lawyers, or simply reprinting case text as-is with no synthesis (a criminally unpunished activity by many casebook creators), Chemrinsky states early on that this book is structured for the student. There is certainly plenty of supplemental information here, with Chemerinsky doing a fine job of synthesizing and categorizing the myriad dimensions of constitutional law, and usefully facilitating the student's learning experience through more than just reprinted cases. The only real problem with this book is its sheer size, which cannot be blamed only on the nature of the subject matter. In my three-credit, one-semester course we only got through about a quarter of the book. When creating a casebook that truly presents constitutional law for the student, which is Chemerinsky's goal, the editor should figure out a way to emphasize the bare fundamentals that should be mastered by the average student who has a limited amount of time available for doing so. [~doomsdayer520~]

I expected more...
Maybe it is because the Chemerinsky is hyped so much in legal circles regarding Constitutional Law, but I was expecting a lot more out of this book than it seemingly offers...the cases are HEAVILY edited, so much so that either my professor will supplement the reading or I will just end up turning to Westlaw or Lexis to read (or at least skim) vast portions of the opinion that have been edited out...