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.

A sitting justice reflects upon the authority of the Supreme CourtÑhow that authority was gained and how measures to restructure the Court could undermine both the Court and the constitutional system of checks and balances that depends on it. A growing chorus of officials and commentators argues that the Supreme Court has become too political. On this view the confirmation process is just an exercise in partisan agenda-setting, and the jurists are no more than Òpoliticians in robesÓÑtheir ostensibly neutral judicial philosophies mere camouflage for conservative or liberal convictions. Stephen Breyer, drawing upon his experience as a Supreme Court justice, sounds a cautionary note. Mindful of the CourtÕs history, he suggests that the judiciaryÕs hard-won authority could be marred by reforms premised on the assumption of ideological bias. Having, as Hamilton observed, Òno influence over either the sword or the purse,Ó the Court earned its authority by making decisions that have, over time, increased the publicÕs trust. If public trust is now in decline, one part of the solution is to promote better understandings of how the judiciary actually works: how judges adhere to their oaths and how they try to avoid considerations of politics and popularity. Breyer warns that political intervention could itself further erode public trust. Without the publicÕs trust, the Court would no longer be able to act as a check on the other branches of government or as a guarantor of the rule of law, risking serious harm to our constitutional system.

The U.S. Supreme Court is the quintessential example of a court that expanded its agenda into policy areas that were once reserved for legislatures. Yet scholars know very little about what causes attention to various policy areas to ebb and flow on the Supreme Court’s agenda. Vanessa A. Baird’s Answering the Call of the Court: How Justices and Litigants Set the Supreme Court Agenda represents the first scholarly attempt to connect justices’ priorities, litigants’ strategies, and aggregate policy outputs of the U.S. Supreme Court. Most previous studies on the Supreme Court’s agenda examine case selection, but Baird demonstrates that the agenda-setting process begins long before justices choose which cases they will hear. When justices signal their interest in a particular policy area, litigants respond by sponsoring well-crafted cases in those policy areas. Approximately four to five years later, the Supreme Court’s agenda in those areas expands, with cases that are comparatively more politically important and divisive than other cases the Court hears. From issues of discrimination and free expression to welfare policy, from immigration to economic regulation, strategic supporters of litigation pay attention to the goals of Supreme Court justices and bring cases they can use to achieve those goals. Since policy making in courts is iterative, multiple well-crafted cases are needed for courts to make comprehensive policy. Baird argues that judicial policy-making power depends on the actions of policy entrepreneurs or other litigants who systematically respond to the priorities and preferences of Supreme Court justices.

Subtitle in hardcover printing: How a band of Yale law students sued the President--and won.

For years, the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice John Roberts has been at the center of a constitutional maelstrom. Here, the much-honored, expert Supreme Court reporter Marcia Coyle's examination of four landmark cases is "informative, insightful, clear and fair...Coyle reminds us that Supreme Court decisions matter. A lot." (Portland Oregonian). Seven minutes after President Obama put his signature to a landmark national health care insurance program, a lawyer in the office of Florida GOP attorney general Bill McCollum hit a computer key, sparking a legal challenge to the new law that would eventually reach the nation’s highest court. Health care is only the most visible and recent front in a battle over the meaning and scope of the US Constitution. The battleground is the United States Supreme Court, and one of the most skilled, insightful, and trenchant of its observers takes us close up to watch it in action. Marcia Coyle’s brilliant inside analysis of the High Court captures four landmark decisions—concerning health care, money in elections, guns at home, and race in schools. Coyle examines how those cases began and how they exposed the great divides among the justices, such as the originalists versus the pragmatists on guns and the Second Amendment, and corporate speech versus human speech in the controversial Citizens United case. Most dramatically, her reporting shows how dedicated conservative lawyers and groups have strategized to find cases and crafted them to bring up the judicial road to the Supreme Court with an eye on a receptive conservative majority. The Roberts Court offers a ringside seat to the struggle to lay down the law of the land.

The bestselling, unprecedented live recordings and transcripts of twenty-three landmark Supreme Court cases.