Best judicial system law books according to redditors
We found 12 Reddit comments discussing the best judicial system law books. We ranked the 6 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 12 Reddit comments discussing the best judicial system law books. We ranked the 6 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
He wrote a good book about how judges think, and I really recommend reading it if you want to know how the actual system works. It's crazy how little weight appellate judges give to the facts when making a decision and how much everything else (politics, social status, what colleagues would think, etc) is really the driving force behind judgments.
> I don't understand what you are talking about.
Briefly, what I am talking about
> Prosecutors themselves understand just how much discretion they enjoy. As Tim Wu recounted in 2007, a popular game in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York was to name a famous person—Mother Teresa, or John Lennon—and decide how he or she could be prosecuted:
> "It would then be up to the junior prosecutors to figure out a plausible crime for which to indict him or her. The crimes were not usually rape, murder, or other crimes you’d see on Law & Order but rather the incredibly broad yet obscure crimes that populate the U.S. Code like a kind of jurisprudential minefield: Crimes like “false statements” (a felony, up to five years), “obstructing the mails” (five years), or “false pretenses on the high seas” (also five years). The trick and the skill lay in finding the more obscure offenses that fit the character of the celebrity and carried the toughest sentences. The, result, however, was inevitable: “prison time.”"
>Do you think Trump's anti-Muslim rhetoric is aligned with American values?
The first duty of a country is to preserve itself. As Thomas Jefferson wrote:
>A strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means.
>Thomas Jefferson
As Justice Robert Jackson wrote in 1949:
>The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.
>Justice Robert Jackson (1949)
If certain foreign aliens have expressed hatred for America, hatred for American values, and wish to attack American, it is the President's duty to exclude these aliens. Hence the concept of "extreme vetting," to exclude aliens who would attack us.
This is fully consistent with the law and the Constitution. The courts have exceeded their jurisdiction in blocking it. The following Supreme Court cases support the President's authority to do this:
>". . . an alien who seeks admission to this country may not do so under any claim of right. Admission of aliens to the United States is a privilege granted by the sovereign United States Government.. . . The exclusion of aliens is a fundamental act of sovereignty. The right to do so stems not alone from legislative power, but is inherent in the executive power to control the foreign affairs of the nation." (ref. Knauff v. Shaughnessy, 338 U.S. 537 (1950))
>"The courts have recognized that the President possesses independent authority over immigration which implicates international relations." (ref. Encuentro del Canto Popular v. Christopher (1996))
>"This Court is not a censor of the morals of other departments of the government; it is not invested with any authority to pass judgment upon the motives of their conduct. When once it is established that Congress possesses the power to pass an act, our province ends with its construction and its application to cases as they are presented for determination. Congress has the power under the Constitution to declare war, and in two instances where the power has been exercised -- in the war of 1812 against Great Britain and in 1846 against Mexico -- the propriety and wisdom and justice of its action were vehemently assailed by some of the ablest and best men in the country, but no one doubted the legality of the proceeding, and any imputation by this or any other court of the United States upon the motives of the members of Congress who in either case voted for the declaration would have been justly the cause of animadversion. We do not mean to intimate that the moral aspects of legislative acts may not be proper subjects of consideration. Undoubtedly they may be at proper times and places, before the public, in the halls of Congress, and in all the modes by which the public mind can be influenced. Public opinion thus enlightened, brought to bear upon legislation, will do more than all other causes to prevent abuses; but the province of the courts is to pass upon the validity of laws, not to make them, and when their validity is established, to declare their meaning and apply their provisions. All else lies beyond their domain." (ref. Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889))
Additional References:
Case closed: Courts lack jurisdiction over Trump’s immigration EO
Rogue judges undermine our sovereignty | Congress can take action
Executive Authority to Exclude Aliens: In Brief
Stolen Sovereignty: How to Stop Unelected Judges from Transforming America
Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency (Inalienable Rights)
Here are a couple of books for you: Three Felonies a Day and Go Directly to Jail
My professor assigned Mauet last year and it was actually really helpful and one of the few books I didn't sell back after graduation.
http://www.amazon.com/Pretrial-Eighth-Edition-Aspen-Coursebooks/dp/1454803037
Seems like you're interested in legal policy and history more than the law itself, and you have a highly romanticized idea of what law school actually is. Very little of what you find interesting is taught in law school, and law school is more just mind numbing statutes and common law rules that are then applied to fake fact patterns.
This book might be up your alley. I haven't read it, but the reviews seem decent. Scalia is a very good writer, even if you don't subscribe to his worldview.
Read the first few chapters of this book to understand the rationale of contructionist arguments.
> Are we to say they can be wrong, but not fallible? How reasonable, or more importantly unreasonable can our reinterpretations be? Can we say, for example, anathemas were only being sarcastic?
We can say that the Council Fathers are wrong and that they are fallible. Only the text they produce and approve, as a body, is infallible (and also not wrong). (This goes double for popes.) Anything else goes beyond the guarantees of Pastor Aeternus and Lumen Gentium. And that's good, because anything else would lead -- fairly quickly -- to madness.
As for rules of construction, I think we might be able to draw a parallel to a classic example in American law: the Second Amendment. Now, the Second Amendment guarantees the "right to bear arms." But it does not define the word "arms." There are a number of reasonable constructions one can place on the word. Some of those different constructions were already available and relevant at the time, and simply weren't spelled out (instead were left to the People and the courts to figure out); for example, was a cannon considered to be "arms"? The Constitution itself does not say; people can reasonably differ. Some of those different constructions were not available at the time; is a nuclear bomb protected by the right to bear arms? Is a handgun? Is a machine gun? None of these things existed at the time of the Founders, so they could not possibly have been thinking "let's guarantee a right to handguns" when they signed (and 13 state legislatures independently ratified) the Second Amendment.
A very small minority of legal thinkers -- mostly sarcastic faux-originalists -- think that our legal analysis should stop there. The original intent of the Founders could only have encompassed guns that actually existed at the time; therefore Americans have a right to bear breech-loading muskets and bow/arrow, but not .22 rifles.
But pretty much everyone agrees that this position is stupid. As I said, most of the people who hold it only hold it sarcastically. The school I follow, textualism, says, "Look at the text. Look at the meanings of the words as they were defined at the time. Determine the different ways those definitions (there are often several different definitions) would be applied to modern arms. Determine which of these interpretations is most reasonable. Evaluate consistency with modern understandings as a factor. Issue a ruling." Under this system, it's obvious that handguns are indeed "arms", by virtually any definition of "arms" you can imagine (from 1789 or 2015), and therefore they are protected by the Second Amendment. The other cases are largely debatable.
Okay, neat story, BCSWowbagger, now tie it back to what we were talking about.
In the 1500s, there were several understandings of "man" floating around, most of them incomplete. Man as biological member of the species. Man as separated substance. Man as hylomorphic person. Man as thinking animal. Trent wrote the word down and didn't define it for us, leaving that for others -- other Councils, if necessary, but reasonable discourse if possible. Now we, in 2015, are looking backwards at this text and aren't sure how to interpret the word "man." But we can look at those different available interpretations and quickly see that some are more reasonable than others: Canon 1 is nonsense if we pick "man as separated substance," since Adam was not a separated substance, and (the passage goes on to say) could not be until after the Fall. So even the Council Fathers would have said that's obviously not how to understand it. Taking it to mean man as biological entity is plausible in the Tridentine context, but creates enormous problems given our more advanced understanding of the development of human life. So, unless we discover some very good reason to adopt it, let's not. It seems most favorable to understand this in terms of the first homo sapiens who was ensouled.
Of course, this is all too pat. Judicial construction does not provide pat answers. Scalia, whom I earlier disparaged, actually wrote a pretty good book, IMO, about the rules of construction. Though his work has been criticized from a number of directions, by people who have slightly different ideas about legal construction. You can spend a lifetime working out the exact boundaries of "how far" you can go before your interpretation becomes unreasonable.
But it doesn't take a lifetime to be able to see that interpreting Canon 1 to mean "ensouled man" is a reasonable understanding of the passage according to the plain meaning of the text, while interpreting Canon 1 as sarcastic is not.
>By saying Adam was so fundamentally different from his parents, that he required a vastly different soul, and a vastly different form, so much so that he was immortal no less and could walk through walls etc., necessitates that we call him a different species from his parent.
Actually, if he were still biologically capable of reproducing with his biological parents -- and we have no reason to believe he would not be (indeed, the fact that we all exist may be attributable to this interbreeding!) -- he would still be a member of the same biological species. Ontologically, something truly extraordinary happens when man is "uplifted". This difference must be reflected biologically, but there's no need to believe that the changes are terribly extraordinary -- indeed, good reason to believe they aren't. I mean, Jesus, after being raised from the dead, was still basically a human being. Just a human being with powers beyond physical (and therefore beyond biological) explanation.
Sure, it says that man did not merely evolve, but that God directly and miraculously intervened at a certain point in the process of evolution. However, the Church has always taught this to be the case, and science has never taught against it -- only the most hard-bitten secular ideologues, acting with no actual basis in science, insist that "science" says belief in miraculous interventions are incompatible with belief in the generally well-supported processes of evolution.
>Furthermore if Man was a plan, are we to affirm that evolution is not based on random mutations, that life spent billions of years with intention, using insignificant mutations to the fulfillment of Adam's parents
That's pretty basic theistic evolution, yeah. Before you raise the classic objections from the evidence, note that we affirm that evolution is not purely random, but providentially directed. We need not affirm (as the Intelligent Design school does) that the providential direction of evolution is detectable by human means.
>Are we to affirm that we as a species have not evolved genetically since Adam. and are not continuing to do so?
Eh? I don't understand where this idea even came from. No, we do not need to affirm that. Why would we? Do you think that man's ontological nature is defined by his genetic code? It's not.
>This first thinking animal definition. How do we define thinking?
There is a complicated argument that perhaps deserves a different week. There are several valid Catholic perspectives on this, and -- on top of that -- modern anthropology has not uncovered enough evidence about the past for us to draw clear conclusions from any of them. Personally, I follow philosopher Walker Percy's thinking that the essential characteristic of man is triadic, symbolic language (as opposed to the mere dyadic, instinctual/Pavlovian communication common to many mammals). But when did that appear? I don't know. Is Percy's definition right? I'm not sure. The Church has not settled the question yet -- and won't, until there's a lot more data available.
>Are we going to say that Adam at 200,000 years ago could understand and communicate with God, acknowledge his threats and transgress his commands?
This is a good Scriptural reason for adopting Percy's definition. Because, yeah, whenever Adam was uplifted ("ensouled" is really a misnomer, since all things have souls; Adam's was just special), he must have been capable of understanding and communicating with God in order to commit his sin -- which Trent tells us was prevarication, a fairly advanced linguistic concept.
If you want a little preview for next week, I tend to think that Adam probably showed up at the start of (and kicked off!) the Upper Paleolithic Revolution, around 50kya. But I've heard at least plausible arguments ranging anywhere from as early as 2.5mya to as recently as 4kya (though, frankly, I get real skeptical of anything more recent than 15kya). I really enjoyed Dr. Ken Kemp's take on the question here, though it is inevitably caught up in questions of monogenesis you're here straining to avoid.
I like theories that are more recent, because the idea of millions of years of unrecorded human history where the poor sods didn't even have the Law of Moses bugs me, but that's just a bias I have, not something based in fact.
I have and I do appreciate Toobin's work, but I prefer the works of Segal and Spaeth, Epstein and Knight, or Maltzman, Spriggs, and Wahlbeck for understanding how the Court works.
Just how government works. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Essential reading on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Stolen-Sovereignty-Unelected-Transforming-America/dp/1944229299