Customer Reviews

Constitutional Law: Cases in Context

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This book redefined my understanding of the Constitution, and is an amazing textbook. People complain that it is not organized doctrinally like ordinary textbooks, but rather chronologically; however, this organization is essential to the author's point -- namely that constitutional law has undergone major shifts, revisions, and alterations during the course of its development, and that to fully understand constitutional law as presently defined by the court (and the vast majority of commentators) is not enough. Anyone who is assigned this textbook should consider themselves lucky.

As has been pointed out, this casebook, unlike most, is organized chronologically as opposed to doctrinally. It's interesting from a historical perspective, but it kept me (and my colleagues) confused until near the end of the course. The cases are not edited down much, which makes for long reading assignments, and it tends to contain a lot of notes containing Barnett's opinions.

In a subsequent Con Law course I used the casebook by Varat, Cohen, and Amar, Concise 13th Ed., which I found far easier to work with: it was organized doctrinally; contained few extraneous notes; and the cases were well-edited to illustrate the point of law intended.

Most con law books are broken up by doctrines; however, this case book is broken up into a chronological order...so its difficult to follow