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Best Law Book Around

Customer Rating:
This book is the best law book that I have ever read. The cases are interesting and well abbreviated. The best part though - the notes before and after the cases. Chemerinsky does a great job of explaining what is going on. Instead of giving you ambiguous answers and rhetorical questions, this book actually explains the law.

I will buy the next edition when it comes out, even though I will be out of law school. That's how good it is. This book should be standard at all schools, and should be the model for legal education text.

A Compelling Interest

Customer Rating:
Mr. Chemrinsky is surely one of the leaders in the education of constitutional law, and his casebook is well tailored for the beginning law school student. Instead of trying to impress other lawyers, or simply reprinting case text as-is with no synthesis (a criminally unpunished activity by many casebook creators), Chemrinsky states early on that this book is structured for the student. There is certainly plenty of supplemental information here, with Chemerinsky doing a fine job of synthesizing and categorizing the myriad dimensions of constitutional law, and usefully facilitating the student's learning experience through more than just reprinted cases. The only real problem with this book is its sheer size, which cannot be blamed only on the nature of the subject matter. In my three-credit, one-semester course we only got through about a quarter of the book. When creating a casebook that truly presents constitutional law for the student, which is Chemerinsky's goal, the editor should figure out a way to emphasize the bare fundamentals that should be mastered by the average student who has a limited amount of time available for doing so. [~doomsdayer520~]

Required for a law class

Customer Rating:
This book was required for my Constitutional Law class in law school. I guess it's an OK book. The condition I received it in was fairly good. There really wasn't much I was looking for because it was merely a required book for a class, and getting it from here was the least expensive option for me.

I expected more...

Customer Rating:
Maybe it is because the Chemerinsky is hyped so much in legal circles regarding Constitutional Law, but I was expecting a lot more out of this book than it seemingly offers...the cases are HEAVILY edited, so much so that either my professor will supplement the reading or I will just end up turning to Westlaw or Lexis to read (or at least skim) vast portions of the opinion that have been edited out...

Aspen casebooks are horrible

Customer Rating:
I have used a bunch of different types of casebooks and now whenever a prof. assigns an Aspen casebook, I know it's going to be a rough course. The problem starts with the text font. Aspen does not clearly distinguish where a case ends and where an editor is writing. The editor's writing, the sections of cases are all written in ths same font, same spacing, and same margins, so that at a quick glance, you don't know if it's part of a case or editorial notes.
Con Law is obviously a huge subject, and there are lots of cases, but there are too many cases saying the same thing in here. Editors should just pick one major case to stick in the casebook. Unfortunately, they end up sticking in about 3 or 4 where one would have been fine.
The use of rhetorical questions in the notes at the end of some cases is also really annoying.