What should the people expect from their legal officials? This book asks whether officials can be moral and still follow the law, answering that the law requires them to do so. It revives the idea of the good official - the good lawyer, the good judge, the good president, the good legislator - that guided Cicero and Washington and that we seem to have forgotten. Based on stories and law cases from America's founding to the present, this book examines what is good and right in law and why officials must care. This overview of official duties, from oaths to the law itself, explains how morals and law work together to create freedom and justice, and it provides useful maxims to argue for the right answer in hard cases. Important for scholars but useful for lawyers and readable by anybody, this book explains how American law ought to work.
Steve Sheppard grew up in Mississippi, where he went to school and college. He went to law school at Columbia and to grad school at Oxford, finishing his doctorate back at Columbia. Steve practiced law full-time for a while but still does amusing or important trials, mainly for charities and mainly in Mississippi.
He has taught law in many places, lecturing and giving scholarly papers in many countries. He teaches full time at the University of Arkansas, where he enjoys his students and colleagues and lives by a lake in the Ozark Mountains with his wife, kids, and dogs.
Sheppard loves the law and wishes more people cared about making it work well for its own sake. This is especially important for lawyers, officials, and judges. He also likes to get the story right, and his interests in legal history are mainly about understanding what really happened with and to the law.
Sheppard has been lucky to have great parents and teachers. Most of his best ideas were stolen from them.
