The Oxford Guide to United States Supreme Court Decisions

This is an amazing book on Constitutional law. It provides a dictionary format with cases in alphabetical order. Each case is described in varying degrees of information based on the criticality of the case to Constitutional law. It's written for the average seeker, and not for a lawyer.You may not grab this book every day, but as you read or listen to the news, you can look up cases that have had a profound effect on the history of our country. Today's news will have greater meaning to you.

This book provides nothing that cannot be researched online in a quarter of the time BUT it is actually interesting to just randomly open and read a couple court decisions before bed.

Bought the '92 edition and updated to the '99 edition. Wish it'd come in a binder so I could incorporate updates as they become available. Better than any civics book. Eye-opening, mind-boggling and absolutely fascinating reading.

I bought this some time ago from a used bookstore and it's been an invaluable reference book for me. I highly recommend this (or better, the new version) for activists, paralegals, and those interested in law and/or history. I imagine it's useful for law students, though I've never attended law school. The cases are listed alphabetically with a quick summary of each case complete with footnotes under the individual case citation. It includes a glossary of terms, appendixes with the Constitution and a timeline of justices and presidential appointments, and a case index as well as a topical index. Very useful when you want a quick history of a case decision, or want a historical background on a topic. Through casual reading, I discovered that the NAACP fought for not only civil rights for Blacks (which I think everyone knows), but also for LGBT rights (which a lot of people don't know) and was able to dig deeper into history. The footnotes include references that are useful for further studies. This edition is 1999, so you'll want to buy the newer edition!

As a law student, I slogged away through case books, trying to understand what a particular Supreme Court decision was about. After seeing this book, I picked it up to see if it would help put the decisions in context for me so that I could better understand the details of each case.By far, this book helped. For these important cases, the authors give you an idea of why the case was in the Supreme Court, some of the background history, the key elements of the decision, and in some cases, the effect of the decision. Not only did I understand how the case was decided, but I understand better about how the decision came about.For any reader trying to understand more about the decisions that have shaped us as a nation, then I would highly recommend taking a look at this book. For law students, this is a quick refresher that will definitely prove helpful.

I found this work fantastically helpful in locating and reading the gist of all the important cases that the Supreme Court has decided. Just a little complaint, however: the index of cases, said to be complete, is not. Loewe v. Lawlor, described on p. 163, for instance, is not listed in the index of cases. Unfortunately, I also found a few other cases which, though treated in the book, are inexplicably missing from this index.