Customer Reviews

Federal Administrative Law (American Casebooks)

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I'm no law professor or administrative law practitioner, but I'm certainly a member of this book's only possible sales demographic - students trying to learn the topic at hand. Therefore I can comment on how truly ineffective this book is as an educational resource. First of all, I'm suspicious of the continued existence of these big expensive leather-bound casebooks, especially when cases and statutes are now available online and usually free to law students. With most of the basic information herein available elsewhere, the book should help synthesize far-flung and disparate legal documentation so the student can discern the basic structure of the topic. In this regard the book fails, and Gary Lawson's educational style (surprisingly, he really is a law professor) is obtuse and pedantic almost to the point of disrespect for the student.

The professor in my class has often disclosed that this textbook deliberately leaves out many details, which he must then supplement from the teaching edition. I'm sure this obscurantism is meant as a pedagogical technique, but it makes much of the book maddeningly difficult for the student trying to prepare for a lecture beforehand. One ridiculous example can be found on page 296, where Lawson introduces "four different tests ..." for a particular administrative law doctrine. The first test is spelled out in the next paragraph, and the second appears two pages later (both by Lawson). However, the third test is embedded in a case ruling three pages later, and the fourth test is embedded in a case ruling seventeen pages later. In neither of the two rulings did the judges use the term "test," and the importance of the statements must be hunted down and inferred; with Lawson neglecting to state that they were the third and fourth items on the list he introduced long before.

In general, because of the layout and typesetting it is often difficult to determine if the text you are reading is from a case, a cited article, or commentary by Lawson. The reprints of cases are also fundamentally problematic because in administrative law, precedents are usually formed via procedural or technical decisions deep within the rulings on cases that are about something else. Nonetheless, Lawson reprints large blocks of unnecessary (for this course) issues and reasonings for cases while often declining to describe where exactly the administrative law precedent can be found within a judge's voluminous rulings and dicta. Overall, this unnecessarily confusing and obtuse casebook does little to help the student untangle the already convoluted realm of administrative law. The author is certainly experienced in the field and he knows the details, but his approach to teaching is inherently unhelpful. [~doomsdayer520~]

The book is fantastic. It is nothing like the usual case books that ask questions at the end, and the reader has no idea how to answer them because the answer can only be found in materials outside the book. The cases are very well edited -if you get a case that can be relevant for two different theories, you don't get everything crammed at one section but at the place where each part of the case belongs. The excerpts on administrative law theory are fabulous: one can actually see how concepts interrelate and how people that made the law thought about it. I would recommend it to any professor to incorporate it in his or her course.