Product Description

Clear and easy to understand, Joel Samaha's best-selling CRIMINAL LAW helps you apply criminal law's enduring foundations and principles to fascinating, current court cases and specific crimes. With a balanced blend of case excerpts and author commentary, Samaha guides you as you hone your critical thinking and legal analysis skills. You'll see the principles, defenses, and elements of crime at work as you progress through the book-and you'll learn about the general principles of criminal liability and its defenses, as well as the elements of crimes against persons property, society, and crimes against the state. Featuring the latest topics and court cases, as well as many study tools to help you do well in this course, Samaha's CRIMINAL LAW is a text you will want to keep as a valuable reference even after you graduate and begin your career in the criminal justice field of your choosing.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12266 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 528 pages

Review
"Samaha’s CRIMINAL LAW is still the best book out there for undergraduates, both the pre-law and pre-law enforcement students."

About the Author
Joel Samaha is Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Minnesota. He teaches Introduction to Criminal Justice, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, The Supreme Court and the Constitution, and a special joint Sociology/History Department topics course, "Is there a Wartime Exception to the Bill of Rights?" He received his B.A., J.D., and Ph.D. from Northwestern University and studied under the late Sir Geoffrey Elton at Cambridge University, England. Professor Samaha was admitted to the Illinois Bar, briefly practiced law in Chicago, and then taught at UCLA before coming to the University of Minnesota in 1971. At the University of Minnesota, he served as Chair of the Department of Criminal Justice Studies for four years, and has taught both television and radio courses in criminal justice and has co-taught a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar in legal and constitutional history. He was named Distinguished Teacher at the University of Minnesota in 1974. Professor Samaha has written numerous publications, including a book on LAW AND ORDER IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE and articles on the history of criminal justice which have appeared in professional history journals and law reviews. He has also written two other highly successful textbooks with Wadsworth, CRIMINAL PROCEDURE, now in its Seventh Edition, and CRIMINAL LAW, in its Ninth Edition.

Customer Reviews

Disappointment: I'm dumping this for another title
The text itself is barely adequate for an undergraduate level class (I wouldn't consider it for graduate study). At first I was excited by the addition of the "case method" technique for presenting criminal theory, but after struggling with the poorly edited cases I find myself actually skipping them.

The explanations and examples used in this book do meet minimal standards, but don't expect much more than that. It's almost as if the author were too busy with other projects to actually put together a quality product.

To make matters worse the support material provided to professors is horrible. I'm not normally a big "test bank" type of instructor, but one of the selling points to this book was the extensive library of material available. Sadly, this is once again proof that quantity does not always equal quality.

The test bank is full of very poorly worded questions. What's worse is that many of the questions have answers which contradict the book. In other words, the test key and the book do not agree....END

simplistic, badly written
Having taught an undergraduate class using this book, I wouldn't really recommend it. The writing lacks punch, and many of the theoretical discussions are over-simplified or simply incorrect. (The discussion of causation is such a case.) For either undergrad or law classes, I'd recommend the more difficult but rewarding Kadish and Schulhofer text.

Criminal Law
So far the book has good case law examples. The problem like every other text book is that it is not state specific. I wished law classes were more specific to the state that you work in. That's not the books fault though.