Customer Reviews

A Book of Legal Lists: The Best and Worst in American Law, with 150 Court and Judge Trivia Questions

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Bernard Schwartz is a renowned constitutional scholar at the University of Tulsa. Mostly, he is known for his research on the Supreme Court, and he has produced a nice history of the Court.

This volume is a bit more lighthearted than the usual sort of fare that law professors put out. Basically, Schwartz has identified what in his view are the ten best Supreme Court decisions, the ten worst Supreme Court decisions, the ten best Supreme Court Justices, the ten worst Supreme Court Justices, and so on. For each entry, he has a short description of that case/justice/etc., along with explanations of why it/he made the list.

The cases will be familiar to any law student, and many of the cases will be familiar to non-lawyers -- i.e., Brown v. Board of Education, Dred Scott, and so on.

At a certain level, however, non-lawyers may find that much of the book is too arcane; Justice Cardozo, for example, is well-known to non-lawyers as having authored the definitive opinion in a bizarre case known as Palsgraf, but to non-lawyers, the reference will be missed.

This book is very well done, and its listings seem reasonable and informative. The reason I do not give it five stars is because it has no footnotes and no bibliography. For instance, on page 188 Schwartz refers to "Shaw's leading biographer" but does not name him nor the title or date of the biography. How simple to have put a footnote on the page, but there is none. But aside from this failing, this is a fun book to read and enjoy.