Dorf's Constitutional Law Stories provides a student with an understanding of 15 leading U.S. constitutional law cases. It focuses on how lawyers, judges, and socioeconomic factors shaped the litigation, and why the cases have attained landmark status. This book is suitable for adoption as a supplement in an introductory constitutional law course or as a text for an advanced seminar.

The law is full of stories, ranging from the competing narratives presented at trials to the Olympian historical narratives set forth in Supreme Court opinions. How those stories are told and listened to makes a crucial difference to those whose lives are reworked in legal storytelling. The public at large has increasingly been drawn to law as an area where vivid human stories are played out with distinctively high stakes. And scholars in several fields have recently come to recognize that law's stories need to be studied critically.This notable volume-inspired by a symposium held at Yale Law School-brings together an exceptional group of well-known figures in law and literary studies to take a probing look at how and why stories are told in the law and how they are constructed and made effective. Why is it that some stories-confessions, victim impact statements-can be excluded from decisionmakers' hearing? How do judges claim the authority by which they impose certain stories on reality?Law's Stories opens new perspectives on the law, as narrative exchange, performance, explanation. It provides a compelling encounter of law and literature, seen as two wary but necessary interlocutors.ContributorsJ. M. BalkinPeter BrooksHarlon L. DaltonAlan M. DershowitzDaniel A. FarberRobert A. FergusonPaul GewirtzJohn HollanderAnthony KronmanPierre N. LevalSanford LevinsonCatharine MacKinnonJanet MalcolmMartha MinowDavid N. RosenElaine ScarryLouis Michael SeidmanSuzanna SherryReva B. SiegelRobert Weisberg.

Softbound - New, softbound print book.

This title sets the most significant international law cases in their social, political, and historical context. It showcases 13 essays by leading international law experts. The essays are organized in three groupings: stories about the development of international human rights law, stories about the use of international law in the U.S. legal system, and stories about international law's impact on interstate politics and the global economy. Experienced international law scholars, teachers, and practitioners will discover valuable new insights, and readers new to international law will find that the book quickly immerses them in the most significant developments in the field.

Softbound - New, softbound print book.

This book is a collaborative effort by fourteen law-school professors to provide a deeper understanding of the great civil procedure cases. The professors each wrote a short chapter on one of the cases, retelling the cases in their own voice and by their own method. Each chapter has a fairly consistent structure, with separate sections on: social and legal background of the case; factual background of the case; lower court proceedings in the case; final appellate disposition, including issues, decisions, reasons, and separate opinions; factual postscript to the case; immediate impact of the case on the development of the law (why the case is famous and when it became so); and continuing importance of the case today (why it is still a leading case).The accompanying website, http://civprostories.law.cornell.edu, serves as a research tool for students, academics, and practitioners. The poste

Softbound - New, softbound print book.

Essay after essay in this fascinating book explores the statutory and historical setting of the cases discussed, rather than mere doctrine, examining in detail lawyers' judgments and tactics. Many use recently revealed papers of Supreme Court Justices to discuss often surprising elements of the decision by the Court. Students can learn a good deal about the handling of these disputes at the administrative level, before they ever get to court -- a perspective essential to understanding the field, but hard to pick up from the reported cases. Attention is paid to the ways in which many of these decisions affected future developments, with primary focus on context and on understanding the ways in which administrative disputes develop, and the roles that lawyers play in developing them.

This book tells the movement and litigation stories behind important reproductive rights and justice cases. The twelve chapters span topics including contraception, abortion, pregnancy, and assisted reproductive technologies, telling the stories of these cases using a wide-lens perspective that illuminates the complex ways law is debated and forged--in social movements, in representative government, and in courts. Some of the chapters shed new light on cases that are very much part of the constitutional law canon--Griswold v. Connecticut, Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs. Others introduce the reader to new cases from state and lower federal courts that illuminate paths not taken in the law. Reading the cases together highlights the lived horizon in which individuals have encountered and struggled with questions of reproductive rights and justice at different eras in our nation's history--and so reveals the many faces of law and legal change. The volume is being published at a critical and perhaps pivotal moment for this area of law. The changing composition of the Supreme Court, increased executive and legislative action, and shifting political interests have all pushed issues of reproductive rights and justice to the forefront of contemporary discourse. The volume is suited to a wide range of law school courses, including constitutional law, family law, employment law, and reproductive rights and justice; it could also be assigned in undergraduate or graduate courses on history, gender studies, and reproductive rights and justice.