Customer Reviews

Constitutional Law, Sixth Edition

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

This is a monumentally frustrating constitutional law casebook that barely addresses critical precedents but bogs the students down with 20 pages of point-counterpoint-countercounterpoint law review articles that simply breed contempt for the subject. I used to love constitutional law, and still do in a broad sense, but this textbook has made the study of an interesting discipline miserable. The organization is also maddening with a brief excerpt of the case and then an "expanded discussion" somewhere else in the assignment.

Also this book is 1700 pages long and bound like a cheap bestseller. Its binding is already starting to break down after one semester of use and the pages do not lie flat. The pages are so thin that any highlighting will just bleed right on through the page.

Professors, please do not adopt this book.

This book sucks worse than anything that has ever sucked before. The notes sections are completely worthless (unless the goal was to take as much random useless crap and throw it all on one page) Too many important cases receive only marginal treatment in the notes section. They threw so much junk on the pages that they had to take it down to size 10 font for it all to fit, which makes reading an already dense subject excruciating. My advice: Get the chemerinsky principles and policies book and a casenote or legalines brief and read the cases you are assigned out of those two supplements.

I won't be saying anything that isn't already said, but I'm going to go ahead and slam this book for personal satisfaction.

I just "completed" my reading for class--which I have later today. By completed, I mean: I found the case that I am expected to read in the text, proceeded to Google it, then copy/pasted a brief onto Word. I then flipped to the notes after the case. This is where you get the understanding right? NO. I read the big bold letters in the notes...TRIED reading each note but ended up just saying "wtf, wtf, wtf...etc" while flipping through and trying to understand what I was seeing. Before I knew it, I had reached the end of the assigned reading, and know nothing.

After suffering because of Stone and friends' inability to compose a text book anyone could actually work with, I open my Con Law supplement by Erwin Chemerinsky and magically understand everything so I can follow along/participate in lecture.

It's not much use telling students not to buy it, since we pretty much are bound to buy the text assigned to the course (unless someone knows something I don't), but PROFESSORS-please do not use this book...it is an utter disgrace to case books. I hate it.

I own several constitutional law texts, and this is easily the most cumbersome one. It's poorly organized: some cases have a clear heading followed by an opinion while others are merely mentioned briefly in notes. The text is hopelessly dense, with huge amounts of information crammed into a ceaseless barrage of verbiage. The notes themselves contain endless facts, factoids, and anecdotes, with little to assist the reader in determining what is most important.

A plea to constitutional law professors everywhere: have some pity on your poor students, and choose a different text.

This is the worst law school case book I have used. The excerpts from the cases are below average, the commentary and notes after and before cases is, entirely too long, confusing, and just filled will all sorts of nonsensical theories. The book plays hide the ball so often, you really have to wonder if the authors/editors really didn't want students to be able to understand anything. I have had both of my constitutional law professors question why the book excluded very important parts of cases as well. If I could give negative stars, I woudl.

On top of that the over-priced "supplement" is a waste of paper and money and includes very few useful additions. Adding another "see some law review article" is not necessary and just frustrating.

Reading this casebook to try to learn Constitutional Law is like trying to learn about the English language by reading a dictionary from cover to cover. This book shows how it is possible to have so much information in one book that the fundamental, essential concepts of the law are drowned out by trivial details.

As other reviewers have complained, this book glosses over some very important cases while giving too much attention to comparatively unimportant ones. For example the U.S. v. Carolene Products footnote--frequently described as one of the most important footnotes in the entire corpus of U.S. Constitutional law--is reduced to, well, a footnote's worth of information. In contrast, you get at least twenty pages of commentary from law review articles discussing why the right to free speech is important in a democratic society (Really? I had no idea!). It is enormously distracting, and makes it very difficult to determine what's important and what can ultimately be glossed over in preparation for the exam. Other casebooks I have used this year have had half the explanatory notes but triple the useful, helpful information that actually increases my understanding of the concepts beyond what the cases can provide.

The book's visual layout leaves a lot to be desired. A very simple but incredibly annoying detail is how there are no line breaks between the numbered endnotes in the note sections. Thus, in sorting through the page to extrapolate actual black letter rules and concepts, one gets lost in a sea of words, citations and numbers. Imagine a casebook with a commentary section that reads like a page-long string citation in a legal brief, and you'll get this book.

In sum, it has been extraordinary difficult to read this book and gain a useful context for the major concepts covered in a first-year ConLaw course. After reading citation after citation and law review article after law review article, one forgets why the cases assigned are even important in the first place. Law professors--if you assign this book, expect your students to be wildly confused unless they purchase Chemerinsky's supplement and read it in place of this one.

As other reviewers have said, it is the worst law school case book ever printed. I love the subject of constitutional law. I love books in general. But I've wanted to burn this book on several occasions. Its flaws? Where should I begin? One of the authors keeps on quoting/excerpting his own law review articles. I won't have so much problem with that if he spent half as much effort on editing the landmark cases so that it reads coherently. The authors have done disservice to the U.S. Supreme Court (because the edited cases make the justices seem completely illogical) and to hundreds of law students having to read their poorly edited book.

Law professors, please do not make your students hate con law by adopting this book. They won't learn anything useful with this book. I'd highly recommend Kathleen Sullivan's con law case book instead.

My biggest issue with this book is that the cases are excerpted so much that they make little to no sense on their own. This might be ok, or even preferable, if the notes and other material were helpful. In the instant case, the supplementary, non-case materials, are virtually non-existent. I do not consider the Notes section as elucidating the material in any way, shape, or form. On the contrary, they serve to distinguish small splits w/o putting forth general rules or trends in the law.

Buy the book for your class. Don't read it (or most of it). Buy a case review supplement and Chemerinksy (if you're more ambitious).

I completely agree with what the first two reviewers noted! It is a terrible book. I am an A student and love reading cases, but this book is simply unbearable! Maybe for someone who already is a constitutional law professor, this book makes sense, I struggle with figuring out what the authors tried to achieve here. Reading supplement before reading this book helps, but this should not be the way we have to study. If only my review prevents any more college professors from adapting this book, my time taken to write this review will be worthwile...

It appears the authors misunderstood the purpose of writing a constitutional law book for first-year law students. The notes are absolutely horrible, citing countless law review articles - as if we have any time to peruse them! - and cases with the barest of facts for context. There is no way to make sense of the notes and the cases cited therein. In the notes sections, important cases don't get "top-billing"; there will be given as much space as an obscure little case that no one really needs to know. The notes pose tons of unhelpful questions and provide no answers generally.

As to be expected, the cases are edited down, a technique which can be helpful, surely. However, you'll notice a few pages later, an additional extended excerpt from the same case, as the authors feel like elaborating on another point. This is extremely frustrating as you try to take notes, because you have to go back and forth between the two excerpts. This just seems like poor editing/excerpting. The authors don't seem to know how to present ideas in an organized or coherent way.

I had the good fortune of auditing a constitutional law class at NYU several years ago, so I am familiar with foundational cases and concepts already. In that class, we used Chemerinsky's Constitutional Law, 2nd Edition (2005). Chemerinsky's casebook is by far the superior text. It introduces concepts like the Dormant Commerce Clause in brief introductory paragraphs, which are then followed by leading cases. Those intro paragraphs help break down difficult concepts and clearly introduce categories of cases from the OUTSET. For example, after introducing the Dormant Commerce Clause, cases are grouped into these sections: facially discriminatory state laws, then facially neutral laws, then the court's analytic approaches to each. (This will be very helpful for outlining later on). Stone et al. barely make any mention of the concept of the "dormant" commerce clause. Information is sprinkled here and there in notes, but you have no idea of how it all fits together.

Chemerinsky/Aspen get points in my mind for not relying on numbered notes. It is my view that authors relying on those numbers are simply incapable of writing sensible transitions between different ideas, so they rely on numbers as a crutch in order to string together odd little remarks. Stone et al. pretends to be enlightening. With all its references to additional resources, the authors seem more fixated on looking impressive than in being instructional and informative. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why any professor would select this book over an alternative like Chemerinsky. For a first-year student, the approach taken by Stone et al. is a simply a waste of time (and money!). Buy Chemerinsky's 2005 casebook instead.