In this groundbreaking book, Scalia and Garner systematically explain all the most important principles of constitutional, statutory, and contractual interpretation in an engaging and informative style with hundreds of illustrations from actual cases. Is a burrito a sandwich? Is a corporation entitled to personal privacy? If you trade a gun for drugs, are you using a gun in a drug transaction? The authors grapple with these and dozens of equally curious questions while explaining the most principled, lucid, and reliable techniques for deriving meaning from authoritative texts. Meanwhile, the book takes up some of the most controversial issues in modern jurisprudence. What, exactly, is textualism? Why is strict construction a bad thing? What is the true doctrine of originalism? And which is more important: the spirit of the law, or the letter? The authors write with a well-argued point of view that is definitive yet nuanced, straightforward yet sophisticated.

Six essays discuss definitions and explanations of folklore, and methods of teaching it. Then 15 additional essays explore Texas folklore related to such topics as police burials, gang graffiti, fiddling, ghosts, dance halls, oil fields, spring rituals, and the dialect spoken along the border between Texas and Mexico. Numerous illustrations and black-and-white photographs. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Winston Churchill, whose output as a writer was so prodigious that one might reasonably wonder whether he was paid by the page, was him self put off by long works. As prime minister of Great Britain, he once pushed away a report from a junior minister, observing, "This paper, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read." No doubt some laymen will glance at the study that follows and be deterred from further consideration by the fact that the study is a scien tific one. If that is a hurdle for you, I hope you will join me in getting over it, because, if you do, you will find that the authors have quite a story to tell. That story is about change-the possibility that the climatic patterns of the world are in a transition to warmer weather that could lead to a rise in the sea level. You may not have thought much about the sea level previously; it was something we took for granted. But since we have taken it as a given for so long, the adjustments we may have to make will be profound. When you stop to think about all the areas of our lives that could be affected by climatic change, you will be amazed: we have planned our cities, developed our manufacturing techniques, and chosen our en vironmental protection strategies on the assumption of a stable seaJevel.