A Practical Companion to the Constitution: How the Supreme Court Has Ruled on Issues from Abortion to Zoning, Updated and Expanded Edition of The Evolving Constitution » (1st Edition)

Jethro K. Lieberman is Professor of Law at New York Law School, Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, and author of The Litigious Society (1981) and The Enduring Constitution (1987), both of which won the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award. He is also the coauthor of A Lawyer's Guide to Writing Well (California, 1991).

"A remarkably illuminating guide to the way the Constitution and the Court actually work. . . . Reading this book is like being inside the Constitution."—Nat Hentoff, Columnist, Village Voice

"Thoughtful, accurate, and informative."—Albert J. Rosenthal, Columbia Law School

"A tour de force: a compact but comprehensive compendium of constitutional law that is both accessible to the lay person and helpful to the specialist. . . . It fills a unique niche in the voluminous constitutional law literature."—Nadine Strossen, President, American Civil Liberties Union

"The more time you spend leafing through this volume, the more you find yourself pausing to read, ponder and admire the entries. It is no small task to write concisely and well about complex and controversial subjects. Lieberman has the rare ability to pull off such a task with great panache."—Daniel J. Kornstein, New York Law Journal

Library Journal

This excellent reference work details the manner in which the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution for almost 200 years. A professor of law at New York Law School, Lieberman has written other books on the Constitution. His present work is well organized, digesting about 2,370 Supreme Court cases into roughly 1200 concise, pertinent, and easily understood essays on constitutional issues. Arranged alphabetically by topic, each essay highlights both the constitutional background and the history of the issue, as well the latest legal developments. The book effectively illustrates the manner in which changing economic and social conditions can frequently alter the way the Supreme Court interprets an issue. For example, evolving attitudes of the Court are evidenced by the change from the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) to the separate-is-inherently-unequal doctrine of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Also, changing political winds can sometimes result in the reversal of decisions once perceived to be definitive--witness the ongoing weakening of the seminal 1973 abortion decision, Roe v. Wade . Highly recommended for public libraries and the general reference collections of academic libraries.-- Philip Y. Blue, Dowling Coll. Lib., Oakdale, N.Y