Constitutional Law for a Changing America: Rights, Liberties, and Justice

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 857 pages
• Published by: CQ Press
• Edition: 6th Edition December 2006
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1933116803
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1933116808
• Book Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 1.7 inches
• Weighs: 3.3 pounds

Product Description
Examining the Supreme Court's interpretation of the basic liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments to the Constitution, the authors cover such important topics as freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, discrimination, and political participation. Shaving off 50 pages with strategic streamlining, the book is now leaner, allowing students to engage more effectively with material, while allowing instructors to assign more cases without necessarily assigning more pages. Bringing the volume fully up-to-date, this sixth edition gives increased attention to the electronic age and the significance of the Internet on speech, press, libel, obscenity, and privacy, as well as the impact of the war on terrorism on rights, liberty, and justice.

Publisher Description
This new edition of Rights, Liberties, and Justice is part of the innovative, highly successful two-volume text that blends the best of legal and political science approaches to constitutional law. Lee Epstein and Thomas G. Walker have carefully selected excerpts from important cases and have provided extensive commentary to help students follow the path of the evolving law.

While Epstein and Walker excerpt in the traditional manner both new and classic cases that best illustrate the development of constitutional law, their approach is distinctive in that it also recognizes the political factors that influence judicial decisions. They emphasize the arguments raised by lawyers and interest groups, and include material that brings out the rich political context in which decisions are made, including the ideological and behavioral inclinations of justices, the politics of judicial selection, and the impact of public opinion and positions taken by elected officials.

The authors draw students into the subject and help them understand why each case is included and how it fits into the development of constitutional doctrine. Students discover that Supreme Court cases are more than just legal names and citations, that they involve real people engaged in real disputes. To further animate the text for students, Epstein and Walker include profiles of influential groups and justices, photographs of litigants, exhibits from the cases, and full descriptions of the events that led to the suits. A helpful appendix includes a glossary of legal terms.

What's New?

The fourth edition of Rights, Liberties, and Justice has been updated throughout to include recent scholarship and key decisions handed down since the publication of the last edition. Also new:

A new chapter (8) on the Second Amendment – the right to bear arms ;

New "Global Perspective" boxes in which the authors compare and contrast U.S. Supreme Court decisions with policies developed in other countries;

"Aftermath" boxes that describe what happened to particular litigants after the Court's rulings.

With the burgeoning of online resources for researching the Supreme Court, Epstein and Walker have included numerous electronic sources throughout the text. Chapter 1, "The Supreme Court and the Constitution," has a new section on how to research the Court using online and print references. Relevant Web site addresses are included throughout, giving readers access to the full opinion for each excerpted case and to the audio recording of oral arguments when available. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Constitutional Law for a Changing America: Rights, Liberties, and Justice (Constitutional Law) (Paperback) I am currently using this textbook for my Constitutional Law class at Winthrop University, and i would like tothat the book is very well written and easily read. The one problem that i have is that the Opinions of the court are not complete, but only the highlights have been stated, as completely understandable, but I find the extra information also informative when trying to write papers on the Opinions, not just the highlights. I otherwise think that the book is superb and quite helpful in my class.