From Booklist
Gr. 6-9. These books in the Landmark Supreme Court Cases series will be a hard sell. Legal scholars, for instance, are still debating the tangled 2000 elections, and students will find the intricacies of the cases boring at best or just too complicated. That said, the books do their best to make their subject understood, and they provide valuable overviews of the legal principles involved as they demonstrate the importance of the cases to American jurisprudence. In McCulloch v. Maryland, the authors explain how the 1819 case influenced banking practices and federal powers. Bush v. Gore introduces hanging chads, butterfly ballots, and the Supreme Court's ultimate installation of a president. Surprisingly, it's the book about the nineteenth-century banking case that is easiest to read. The series format--staid, with print and pictures that give the books an overall gray effect--is young looking, but the best place for the books is probably in high-school libraries, where the report writers will find them useful. Ilene Cooper
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