Product Description

The Sixteenth Edition provides comprehensive coverage of all areas of constitutional law, including judicial review, separation of powers, federalism, due process, equal protection, free speech, and religious liberty. It emphasizes constitutional law as a species of law, and aims to enable students who use it to practice constitutional law as lawyers. It also seeks to illuminate the historical, theoretical, and philosophical background that bears on constitutional law and informs its practice. The 16th edition thoroughly revises, updates and streamlines this classic casebook, emphasizing contemporary problems in areas from the war on terror to new uses of the Internet. Highlights of the 16th edition include the final decisions of the Rehnquist Court, a preliminary look at the first two terms of the Roberts Court, and expanded analysis of recent controversial decisions from Hamdan v. Rumsfeld to Gonzales v. Raich and Kelo v. City of New London. It includes all key constitutional cases through the 2006-2007 Supreme Court Term, including the Court's latest holdings on abortion, race-based assigments in the public schools, drug-related speech by public school students, and limits on campaign finance.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #79994 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1460 pages

About the Author
Kathleen M. Sullivan is the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law and former Dean of the Stanford University School of Law.

Gerald Gunther is the late William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law Emeritus, Stanford University School of Law.

Customer Reviews

An excellent casebook on Constitutional Law
Unfortunately, law school is not for everyone (see the reviews below). However, I would not lay the blame at the feet of what is an excellent casebook. If one is looking for a quick and shallow statement of the blackletter law then I recommend reading Emmanuel's (full disclosure: I was a paid reviewer for Emmanuel's). If you want to understand Constitutional Law without having to read the cases, then I highly recommend American Constitutional Law by Laurence Tribe, which is an excellent book in its own right, and I would strongly recommend it in addition to the Gunther and Sullivan casebook. However, it is necessary in order to gain a full understanding of the law to go through the process of case analysis.

This is especially true in the field of Constitutional Law. While it is perhaps possible for one to become an expert on the topic of Criminal Law or Torts on Emmanuel's alone, it is necessary to read the cases to fully understand Constitutional Law. This is because Constitutional law is composed of primarily three things: first, the text of the Constitution itself; second, historical documentation such as the Federalist Papers (I strongly recommend the Mentor edition); and third, the cases themselves, precedent. This is the stuff that con law is made of, Justice Brennan and the "spirit" of the Constitution notwithstanding.

If you have the capacity and the desire to learn constitutional law, I would strongly recommend purchasing this casebook. Gunther and Sullivan do an excellent job of structuring the cases, and the notes will probe and challenge your understanding of the material, and even provide a synopsis of the "law" in case you failed to read the case as thoroughly as perhaps you should have.

Tough Topic, Great Casebook
This is as good a constitutional law casebook as it gets. Nobody ever said that this area of the law is even remotely clear and easily accessible. Gunther and Sullivan have managed to put together a comprehensive list of cases that does justice to the, sometimes, mind - boggling complexity of the law. Those that just want to get through law school will be satisfied reading Emanuels; those that are scholars of the law will enjoy the challenge of this casebook.

A very good casebook for a very difficult subject
Profs Gunther and Sullivan's casebook is an excellent casebook for Constitutional Law which is a difficult area of law professors to teach and for law students to understand.

Pros: Good case edits; excellent, almost flawless treatment of materials up until the First Amendment materials; instructive, informative, and, at times, prophetic notes to the cases.

Cons: The First Amendment Section of the book (roughly the last 500 pages) suffers at times from a thematic layout that sometimes confuses the chronological timeframes; because of the formatting of the text, the notes that follow the case are sometimes difficult to distinguish from the cases themselves and/or note cases.