Overview

Full Product Details

9780195118049

Table of Contents

Reviews

This carefully nuanced description of the kind of reasoning employed in law, a process often mysterious to outsiders, is the best I've seen. --The New York Times Book Review An eloquent review of how the law works. --The Washington Post Book World

This carefully nuanced description of the kind of reasoning employed in law, a process often mysterious to outsiders, is the best I've seen. --The New York Times Book Review An eloquent review of how the law works. --The Washington Post Book World The arguments are elegant and the writing smooth and witty; the book deserves to be among the first taken down from the self by any student of legal theory and practice. --Choice [Sunstein's] carefully nuanced description of the kind of reasoning employed in law, a process often mysterious to outsiders, is the best I've seen, and captures the way judges actually make decisions in most cases....Mr. Sunstein has provided an articulate and comprehensible entry into the intellectual world of lawyers and judges....Anyone who wishes to learn what 'thinking like a lawyer' is all about should read this book. --The New York Times Book Review An eloquent review of how the law works. --Joan Biskupic, The Washington Post Book World If you are looking for an account of law that avoids the impossibly abstract choices posed by most legal theory and puts you in touch with the law as it really works, this is it. --Stanley Fish, Duke University Outside observers of American legal theory and practice can easily form the impression that American law is tortuous and arbitrary. Since everything is a bit like everything else, any conclusion can be justified. In this innovative work Cass Sunstein deals head-on with this problem. He argues persuasively that analogies form part of any legal system, and that the request for judges to make their decisions on the basis of first principles runs into decisive pragmatic objections. It is a book that is obligatory reading for anyone concerned with the nature of law as it is actually practiced. --Jon Elster, Robert K. Merton Professor of Social Science, Columbia University A central characteristic of American judicial reasoning is its particularity. Indeed, the best of American legal theory has attempted to explain and justify an approach focusing on the features of individual cases and avoiding reliance on rigid rules. Sunstein's book not only offers the most comprehensive attempt to defend particularistic decisionmaking in all of its manifestations, but also gives the most powerful defense. Defenders of rules, categories, and abstraction will have a formidable task in trying to penetrate the armor of Sunstein's normative defense of particularistic decisionmaking. --Frederick Schauer, Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment, Harvard University Cass Sunstein's new book makes a significant addition to our understanding of how law works and of the nature of law itself. He explains in lucid prose, with many concrete examples, the components of good (and bad) legal reasoning and how they contribute to the outcome of legal controversies. Sunstein's ideas, which combine keen insight, common sense, and a vast knowledge of legal materials, are sure to prompt discussion. His account of 'incompletely theorized agreements' especially is original and important. The book will be of great value to scholars as well as to those who are beginning the study of law. --Lloyd L. Weinreb, Dane Professor of Law, Harvard University

This carefully nuanced description of the kind of reasoning employed in law, a process often mysterious to outsiders, is the best I've seen. --The New York Times Book Review<br> An eloquent review of how the law works. --The Washington Post Book World<br>

Author Information

Cass R. Sunstein is Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence and Co-Director of the Center on Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe at the University of Chicago. One of America's preeminent writers on legal issues, he is the author most recently of Free Markets and Social Justice (OUP 1997), and Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech, and is a frequent contributor to The New Republic and The New York Times Book Review.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available