In the updated, fourth edition of this classic text which has been translated into over a dozen languages, constitutional scholar and Columbia Law School professor E. Allan Farnsworth provides a clear explanation of the structure and function of the U.S. legal system in one handy reference. AnIntroduction to the Legal System of the United States, Fourth Edition is designed to be a general introduction to the structure and function of the legal system of the United States, and is especially useful for those readers who lack familiarity with fundamental establishments and practices.
This text also gives the reader a clear understanding of how to research the law, the importance of case law versus statutes, and the difference between private and public law. It illustrates issues that may be confusing or troublesome and provides a solid general overview. It includes a new introduction by Steve Sheppard.

Family Law provides a comprehensive guide to family law legislation and practice in Ireland. It is an essential tool for family law students and practitioners but also for those outside of the legal profession whose work crosses over this area of law, and those with a general interest in how family law operates in Ireland.
Edited by a leading expert in the field, this fourth edition covers extensive areas of family law practice in Ireland and has been fully updated to include recent significant legislative changes introduced by the Civil Partnership and Certain Rights and Obligations of Cohabitees Act 2010. It contains revised coverage of separation agreements, judicial separation, divorce and ancillary orders, as well as of the law relating to children.

In the summer of 2008 Kimberley Motley quit her job as a public defender in Milwaukee to join a program that helped train lawyers in war-torn Afghanistan. She was thirty-two at the time, a mother of three who had never travelled outside the United States. Through sheer force of personality, ingenuity and perseverance, Kimberley became the first foreign lawyer to practise in Afghanistan and her work swiftly morphed into a mission - to bring 'justness' to the defenceless and voiceless. She has established herself as an expert on its fledgling criminal justice system, able to pivot between the country's complex legislation and its religious laws in defence of her clients. Her radical approach has seen her successfully represent both Afghans and Westerners, overturning sentences for men and women who've been subject to often appalling miscarriages of justice. Inspiring and fascinating in equal measure, Lawless tells the story of a remarkable woman operating in one of the most dangerous countries in the world.

This collection of essays is a unique contribution to understanding the issues confronting law schools in Central and Eastern Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union as they seek to ensure that their programs meet the needs of 21st century lawyers. The book is unusual in two ways. First, most of the authors are faculty members at universities in the region. Despite a plethora of initiatives to reform legal education in Central and Eastern Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union, there has been little literature on the topic coming from the region itself. Second, the essays address structural issues as well as pedagogical ones (e.g., the disincentives for academics to invest time in developing new teaching methodologies and the problems posed by rigid government standards for higher education). It is particularly useful to have these essays collected in one book, so that readers can see both problems and some suggested solutions in a cross-cultural context.

Solicitors' Accounts provides a user-friendly guide to a subject that often poses serious problems for students unfamiliar with the principles and practice of accounting. It provides comprehensive, up-to-date coverage of all areas required by the Solicitors' Regulation Authority for business accounts and solicitors' accounts on the Legal Practice Course, including full coverage of double-entry book-keeping and final accounts of sole owners, partnerships and companies. It also deals with the Solicitors' Accounts Rules and the practical application of these in solicitors' accounts, including property and probate transactions.
Each chapter starts with an overview of the areas to be covered and also states the learning objectives the student should aim to achieve. Contextual examples are used throughout the chapters demonstrating how the principles of accounting should be applied to situations in practice. At the end of each chapter there is a checklist of the key areas students must be able to understand, followed by graded self-test questions which suggest to the student how long they should spend completing them and what they should move onto next.
Written by experienced former LPC tutors, the guide is essential reading for students and a useful reference source for practitioners.
Online Resource Centre
Solicitors' Accounts is accompanied by an Online Resource Centre designed to encourage students to apply their knowledge of accounts. Interactive exercises are provided for students and a test bank of questions enables lecturers to assess their students' understanding of accounts.

Law is best interpreted in the context of the traditions and cultures that have shaped its development, implementation, and acceptance. However, these can never be assessed truly objectively: individual interpreters of legal theory need to reflect on how their own experiences create the framework within which they understand legal concepts. Theory is not separate from practice, but one kind of practice. It is rooted in the world, even if it is not grounded by it. In this highly original volume, Allan C. Hutchinson takes up the challenge of self-reflection about how his upbringing, education, and scholarship contributed to his legal insights and analysis. Through this honest examination of key episodes in his own life and work, Hutchinson produces unique interpretations of fundamental legal concepts. This book is required reading for every lawyer or legal scholar who wants to analyse critically where he or she stands when they practice and study law.

Expressions of support for diversity are nearly ubiquitous among contemporary law firms and corporations. Organizations back these rhetorical commitments with dedicated diversity staff and various diversity and inclusion initiatives. Yet, the goal of proportionate representation for people of color and women remains unrealized. Members of historically underrepresented groups remain seriously disadvantaged in professional training and work environments that white, upper-class men continue to dominate. While many professional labor markets manifest patterns of demographic inequality, these patterns are particularly pronounced in the law and elite segments of many professions. Diversity in Practice analyzes the disconnect between expressed commitments to diversity and practical achievements, revealing the often obscure systemic causes that drive persistent professional inequalities. These original contributions build on existing literature and forge new paths in explaining enduring patterns of stratification in professional careers. These more realistic assessments provide opportunities to move beyond mere rhetoric to something approaching diversity in practice.

The Holistic Lawyer shows legal professionals that there is a way to keep up their standards without getting overwhelmed. Ritu Goswamy, lawyer and productivity consultant, builds on her successful New Billable Hour (TM) program in The Holistic Lawyer where she reveals tools to level up legal professionals' practice even more, using one of their biggest resources: their own brain. The Holistic Lawyer teaches readers how to move from overwhelm to efficiency and reach maximum success in their professional and personal life. Within its pages, Ritu teaches legal professionals: Why lawyers overwork...and how to stop How they can use their brain instead of letting it use them Why working hard to prove competence is counterproductive How increasing their emotional intelligence makes them more ethical What steps to take to work more efficiently The legal profession is changing rapidly. It's time for lawyers to work smarter not harder, and Ritu is going to show them how.

Law, by its very nature, tends to think locally, not globally. This book has a broader scope in terms of the range of nations and offers a succinct journey through law schools on different continents and subject matters. It covers education, research, impact and societal outreach, and governance. It illustrates that law schools throughout the world have much in common in terms of values, duties, challenges, ambitions and hopes. It provides insights into these aspirations, whilst presenting a thought-provoking discussion for a more global agenda on the future of law schools. Written from the perspective of a former dean, the book offers a unique understanding of the challenges facing legal education and research.

Law, by its very nature, tends to think locally, not globally. This book has a broader scope in terms of the range of nations and offers a succinct journey through law schools on different continents and subject matters. It covers education, research, impact and societal outreach, and governance. It illustrates that law schools throughout the world have much in common in terms of values, duties, challenges, ambitions and hopes. It provides insights into these aspirations, whilst presenting a thought provoking discussion for a more global agenda on the future of law schools. Written from the perspective of a former dean, the book offers a unique understanding of the challenges facing legal education and research.

While many young people become lawyers for the big bucks, others are motivated by the pursuit of social justice, seeking to help people for whom legal services are financially, socially, or politically inaccessible. These progressive lawyers often bring a considerable degree of idealism to their work, and many leave the field due to insurmountable red tape and spiraling disillusionment. But what about those who stay? And what do their clients think? Negotiating Justice explores how progressive lawyers and their clients negotiate the dissonance between personal idealism and the realities of a system that doesn't often champion the rights of the poor.

Corey S. Shdaimah draws on over fifty interviews with urban legal service lawyers and their clients to provide readers with a compelling behind-the-scenes look at how different notions of practice can present significant barriers for both clients and lawyers working with limited resources, often within a legal system that many view as fundamentally unequal or hostile. Through consideration of the central themes of progressive lawyering--autonomy, collaboration, transformation, and social change--Shdaimah presents a subtle and complex tableau of the concessions both lawyers and clients often have to make as they navigate the murky and resistant terrains of the legal system and their wider pursuits of justice and power.

The Literature of the Law brings together examples of the very best in judicial pronouncements over four centuries and two continents.
Assembled into themes, such as life and death deicisions, freedom of speech and the protection of minorities, they form a fascinating summary of the law's interaction with society. The Literature of the Law also paints an intriguing and sometimes humorous picture of the lawyer's life in and out of court, illustrating with examples some of the different styles of advocacy.
The text is stripped of legal references, which might get in the way of the general reader, and is finished with a number of line illustrations of legal London.

The captivating story of how a diverse group of women, including Janet Reno and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, broke the glass ceiling and changed the modern legal profession In Stories from Trailblazing Women Lawyers, award-winning legal historian Jill Norgren curates the oral histories of one hundred extraordinary American women lawyers who changed the profession of law. Many of these stories are being told for the first time. As adults these women were on the front lines fighting for access to law schools and good legal careers. They challenged established rules and broke the law's glass ceiling.Norgren uses these interviews to describe the profound changes that began in the late 1960s, interweaving social and legal history with the women's individual experiences. In 1950, when many of the subjects of this book were children, the terms of engagement were clear: only a few women would be admitted each year to American law schools and after graduation their professional opportunities would never equal those open to similarly qualified men. Harvard Law School did not even begin to admit women until 1950. At many law schools, well into the 1970s, men told female students that they were taking a place that might be better used by a male student who would have a career, not babies. In 2005 the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession initiated a national oral history project named the Women Trailblazers in the Law initiative: One hundred outstanding senior women lawyers were asked to give their personal and professional histories in interviews conducted by younger colleagues. The interviews, made available to the author, permit these women to be written into history in their words, words that evoke pain as well as celebration, humor, and somber reflection. These are women attorneys who, in courtrooms, classrooms, government agencies, and NGOs have rattled the world with insistent and successful demands to reshape their profession and their society. They are women who brought nothing short of a revolution to the profession of law.

During the coming decades, the digital revolution that has transformed so much of our world will transform legal education as well. The digital production and distribution of course materials will powerfully affect both the content and the way materials are used in the classroom and library. This collection of essays by leading legal scholars in various fields explores three aspects of this coming transformation. The first set of essays discusses the way digital materials will be created and how they will change concepts of authorship as well as methods of production and distribution. The second set explores the impact of digital materials on law school classrooms and law libraries and the third set considers the potential transformation of the curriculum that the materials are likely to produce. Taken together, these essays provide a guide to momentous changes that every legal teacher and scholar needs to understand.

This collection of essays commissioned by the SPTL (Society of Public Teachers of Law) brings together the views of leading experts in legal education in a debate about the aims and achievements of legal education on the 20th century, and the challenges which legal education faces on the verge of the 21st century. The themes of this collection are important ones for the future of legal education and the legal professions and they are not by any means confined to the interests of English lawyers. The challenges faced by English law are found in many other countries around the world including Australia, the USA, and parts of the European Union. These essays will therefore be of interest to a world-wide audience of legal educators. The questions raised by some of the contributors are also of wider significance in the debate about the role of universities. Law, like medicine, is frequently regarded as a subject worthy of university education merely because graduates are needed to provide the profession with its new recruits. But English law schools have always maintained a distinctively scholarly mission reflecting a wider liberal commitment to education. As the 20th century draws to a close universities face unprecedented pressures and in the teaching of law the battle lines are now drawn between those who favour, on the one hand, a rigorous intellectual approach to the teaching of law and those, on the other hand, who would see law schools reduced to being feeder institutions for the legal profession. It is the importance of the essays in this volume that they eschew either a simple analysis of the problems facing legal education or the solutions, many of them equally simplistic, which abound in the current climate of discussion. By tackling the issues in a historical, comparative and empirical fashion these essays contribute greatly to a better understanding of the ideals which deserve to be praised in any system of legal education.

Among members of the legal profession and judiciarysional throughout the world, there is a genuine concern with establishing and maintaining high ethical standards. It is not difficult to understand why this should be so. But, in order to ensure that the standards established are the right ones, it is necessary first of all to examine important philosophical and policy issues. Such an examination is the purpose of this book.

Written by a distinguished group of law teachers and practitioners together with senior members of the judiciary, the book has as its underlying themes:

This collection of essays on legal ethics addresses the subject comparatively, unlike any previous publication in either the UK or the US. Many of the papers originated from rare collaborative empirical research between academic and practising lawyers combining to produce a book that is unique in its concern with the issues that affect all lawyers in common law systems today. These lawyers are naturally apprehensive about the unprecedented investigation, criticism, and attack which they face. They fear for their livelihood and status in the community while sharing the public's sense of unease. Searching for immediate changes that might placate economic deregulators, the press and politicians, is one of the aims of this collection of original essays, many of which are written by people who are, or were, practitioners of law. This is reflected in the types of initiatives which are debated in this volume - to reform adversarial rules of procedure, to introduce mediational alternatives, and to curb systematic biases. The aims of this volume are therefore to reflect some of the key issues, to suggest possible arguments which might lead to solutions, and to provide readers, particularly those involved in practice, with strategies for devising more 'ethical' practices.

The law in a modern society is an extremely bulky and complex instrument, with a distracting tendency to become less fixed, less rule-oriented, and more discretionary. An institution made by men for the government of men, the law today can all too readily confuse and dismay us. How and why is so much new law made? By what right does a judge order that a man be sent to gaol? Why is so much law so bad, and why should we, the people, accept the laws made by those who claim the right to govern us? In this lucid, stimulating and completely updated survey, which presupposes no specialist knowledge of the subject, P S Atiyah introduces the reader to a number of fundamental issues about the law, the legal profession, and the adjudicative process. This new edition gives greater emphasis to the effect of membership of the European Community on English law, and gives an expanded account of the European convention on Human Rights with its subsequent effects on English law. Atiyah also looks at the recent controversy over the independence of the judiciary, problems arising from the cost of legal services and legal aid, and the many appalling miscarriages of justice which have disfigured the legal system in the past decade.