Tying together legal, historical, social, political and literary strands to show how the law itself was implicated in the persistence of slavery, this work sheds new light on slavery and Southern history, as it probes the conscience of a troubled jurist incapable of fully transcending his times.

This is the first comprehensive analysis of how the collective nature of Supreme Court decision making affects the transformation of the justices' preferences into constitutional doctrine. Analyzing the Supreme Court from the perspective of social choice theory, Maxwell L. Stearns offers new insights into Supreme Court decision making that have profound implications for understanding the outcomes in a number of cases and the resulting doctrinal development within constitutional law which traditional analyses have proven ill-equipped to explain. The book models several important process-based Supreme Court rules, including outcome voting, the narrowest-grounds rule, stare decisis, and justiciability, with a particular emphasis on standing. These doctrines have each had a significant impact upon the evolution of modern constitutional law, including but not limited to the following areas: affirmative action, school desegregation, racial gerrymandering, obscenity, and abortion. Each model is presented in nontechnical language with several concrete illustrations drawn from recent Supreme Court case law. The book offers a new understanding of two apparently paradoxical situations: first, cases in which there are separate majorities on specific issues in the case that suggest, logically, that there should be a majority for the dissenting result; and second, cases in which discrete minorities--as opposed to the apparent majority--control the identification and resolution of dispositive case issues. In addition, the book sheds new light on why the Court employs stare decisis, even though the doctrine grounds the evolution of legal doctrine on the order in which cases are presented and decided, and on how the modern standing doctrine ameliorates the incentives for interest groups to time the litigation of cases in a way that will exert a disproportionate influence over the direction of constitutional doctrine. This book will appeal to scholars of the Supreme Court or judicial decision-making. It should also be of interest to students of social choice and of law and economics who have not previously considered the Supreme Court or constitutional law as fertile ground for their disciplines. Maxwell L. Stearns is Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law.

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.

Few constitutional disputes maintain as powerful a grip on the public mind as the battle over the Second Amendment. The National Rifle Association and gun-control groups struggle unceasingly over a piece of the political landscape that no candidate for the presidency--and few for Congress--can afford to ignore. But who's right? Will it ever be possible to settle the argument? In Out of Range, one of the nation's leading legal scholars takes a calm, objective look at this bitter debate. Mark V. Tushnet brings to this book a deep expertise in the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the role of the law in American life. He breaks down the different positions on the Second Amendment, showing that it is a mistake to stereotype them. Tushnet's exploration is honest and nuanced; he finds the constitutional arguments finely balanced, which is one reason the debate has raged for so long. Along the way, he examines various experiments in public policy, from both sides, and finds little clear evidence for the practical effectiveness of any approach to gun safety and prosecution. Of course, he notes, most advocates of the right to keep and bear arms agree that it should be subject to reasonable regulation. Ultimately, Tushnet argues, our view of the Second Amendment reflects our sense of ourselves as a people. The answer to the debate will not be found in any holy writ, but in our values and our vision of the nation. This compact, incisive examination offers an honest and thoughtful guide to both sides of the argument, pointing the way to solutions that could calm, if not settle, this bitter dispute.

In 1919 American Communist Party member Benjamin Gitlow was arrested for distributing a "Left Wing Manifesto," a publication inspired by the Russian Revolution. He was charged with violating New York's Criminal Anarchy Law of 1902, which outlawed the advocacy of any doctrine advocating to the violent overthrow of government. Gitlow argued that the law violated his right to free speech but was still convicted. He appealed and five years later the Supreme Court upheld his sentence by a vote of 7-2. Throughout the legal proceedings, much attention was devoted to the "bad tendency" doctrine-the idea that speakers and writers were responsible for the probable effects of their words-which the Supreme Court explicitly endorsed in its decision. According to Justice Edward T. Sanford, "A state may punish utterances endangering the foundations of organized government and threatening its overthrow by unlawful means." More important was Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' dissent, in which he argued that the mere expression of ideas, separated from action, could not be punished under the "clear and present danger" doctrine. As Holmes put it, "Every idea is an incitement"-and the expression of an idea, no matter how disagreeable, was protected by the First Amendment. While the majority disagreed, it also raised and endorsed the idea that the Bill of Rights could be violated by neither the federal government nor individual states-an idea known as "incorporation" that was addressed for the first time in this case. In recreating Gitlow, Marc Lendler opens up the world of American radicalism and brings back into focus a number of key figures in American law: defense attorney Clarence Darrow; New York Court of Appeals justices Roscoe Pound and Benjamin Cardozo; Walter Pollak of the fledgling ACLU; and dissenting justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis. Lendler also traces the origins of the incorporation doctrine and the ebb and flow of Gitlow as a precedent through the end of the Cold War. In a time when Islamic radicalism raises many of the same questions as domestic Communism did, Lendler's cogent explication of this landmark case helps students and Court-watchers alike better understand "clear and present danger" tests, ongoing debates over incitement, and the importance of the Holmes-Brandeis dissent in our jurisprudence.