Customer Reviews

American Courts

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This really is a fantastic book. Professor Meador, having spent half a century as a teacher at one of the world's finest law schools and as a consultant and advisor to legal scholars and judges from state courts to the Supreme Court, manages to speak to everyone who hasn't had the opportunity to attend law school. Reading this book won't make you a lawyer, but you will understand exactly what happens in our court systems - a must for new law students, foreign lawyers and anyone interested in how their nation's legal systems work. It was an invaluable help in my first year of law school, and worth every dime.

Nice concise description of the US Court system. The American judicial system is quite complex. This little book explains it in easy terms.

This book accomplishes what it sets out to do: establish for its reader a very basic understanding of the American Court system on both a state and federal level. However, I found the book to oversimplify many subjects, giving the excuse that "to go further into this topic would require an entire law school course". For a book that's main content barely approaches 80 pages, this sounds more like laziness on the part of the author than an honest attempt to explore the issues in a condensed format. Also, the author, under the premise of writing an objective text-book, inserts his opinion about various judicial processes in a manner I found rather subversive -- and at points even laughable; take his opinion about the contentious issue of Judges relying too heavily on support staff to generate judicial decisions:

"The best protection against inappropriate delegation of judicial authority, whether to law clerks or staff attorneys, is the conscientious dedication of each judge to his professional responsibility to understand the law and the facts in each case and to reach his own reasoned decisions" (59).

While I am no expert in the field, surely the best protection against these sorts of delegation is not just hoping for conscientious judges. Again this seems to oversimplify a complex issue in the interest of conserving space - or the author's time.

Overall, however, the book does establish a good base knowledge of the American judicial system and some of the issues that are at play in it, and with a main text only 77 pages long, it does that very efficiently.

This is a very short introduction to the U. S. court system. It is perfect as a first introduction to this subject. The author writes with great clarity, making a complex sytem approchable.

However, I expected it to be much more substantial considering the price. Small features such as including diagrams of all 50 state court systems in the Appendix rather than just four examples could easily be added and make it far more useful since every state's is different. Since lawyers need to pass bar exams on the particulars of their state further information would be far more useful.

This is a short book and the skills of the author allow for part of this, however it is far too concise for the price (even used)!

I bought this book as a pre-req for law school. I found it to be a good refresher for the court system and how it runs. If you are beginning law school or classes in government, you will want to review this book.

The book itself is in good condition and the description given by the vendor is correct. However, I am not sure this book was needed for me to buy only because it's a Starter Book. It's not really the main book for my classes, I found this out once I got all the REQUIRED books for class. So it would of saved me money if I opt out on buying this. This is only my own thoughts as I noticed most of the materials in this book is covered in the REQUIRED Book too.