Awful, Horrible, Bad Content The editing sucks. The notes suck. The case selection sucks.
Construction This book shares the same physical problems that all Aspen casebooks suffer. The binding sucks. The book will not lay flat; the hump in the pages makes it hard to read, damn near impossible to underline. The paper is too thin, print shows through not only from the other side of the page, but from other pages below. The paper is an icky off white. The font is funky with awkward leading and hard to read. The margins are non-existent. Forget about writing in the book. The cover is cheaply made and wears poorly.
Compare to a University Casebook Series book which lies flatter, has wide margins, easy to read font and page layout, nice white paper, and excellent build quality.
UPDATE: By the end of the semester, no one in my class of over 60 was still reading this book. Don't waste your money buying, even if its assigned. Don't use this awful book.
Con law students, if you're assigned this awful book, here's what to do. Wikipedia has awesome summaries on con law cases, such as "Lochner v. New York" and "Roe v. Wade," and con law topics, such as "incorporation" and "substantive due process." Don't use this book. First, read wikipedia, then use what ever supplement is assigned or that you like (I liked Understanding Constitution Law from Lexis, but most students in my class liked the assigned Constitutional Law by Chemerinsky). If need be, you can look up a case on Lexis or Westlaw, and with the headnotes, jump to the relevant portion of the case. You don't need this book, and even if you buy it, after a couple of weeks you'll stop reading it.
buy the casenotes.... Truly one of the worst law school books I've used so far. Everything the other (negative reviews) said was true. The author doesn't use footnotes, captions, endnotes, or offset text. No it is all just thrown together in one huge block of text on the page. The reading is nothing more than wading thru a morass of text which actually has no real bearing on the cases presented and doesn't add anything constructive to the understanding of the nuances of the case. horrible writing. Horrible editing. This book would be 1000% better if all supporting text was removed and nothing more than the bare cases were presented.
If you are a professor, don't use this book. If you are a student, buy casenotes and only read the cases from this book.
So much cheaper than the 2005 edition If you are buying this, I assume you are buying because you have to for class. In that case you will likely have noticed that the current edition is vastly more expensive and came out only 2 years after this edition. How much could the law change in 2 years? Is it false economy to scrimp on the books when you are paying through the teeth for law school already?
Here I attempt to answer these questions.
I used this edition of the book rather than the 2005 edition for both Con Law 1 and 2. The changes from this edition to the newer one were minor. In Con Law 1, I had to pull two new cases off FindLaw and only had to pull one new case for Con Law 2. Other than that the books were similar and most assigned readings were word for word the same between editions.
An added bonus was that the professors for both classes have been teaching the subject for years, and in the three sections that were significantly different both tended to teach focused on the older edition. In one class, the previous edition had an older case which had been replaced by the Gore Bush election recount case (an added case). The older case had been shortened to a note, but the professor elaborated on it. Not only was I not lost for using the older book - I had an edge.
I highly recommend economizing by buying the older book in this case. Constitutional law does not change frequently, and this did not disadvantage me. And to quell any doubts, I scored in the top third for both classes.
Reasonable - Good Historical Materials I've had cause to study this book a little for a course in Constitutional Problems at the University of Western Australia. Inevitably - while my requirements cannot be as detailed or exhaustive as that of my American friends, I found it a useful guide to the major cases and enjoyed the historical references. I particularly enjoyed the Race and the Constitution (equality and 14th amendment stuff) chapter and the dicussion of the case law preceding Brown v. Board of Education.
Keep looking I hate to say it because I've actually had both Prof. Stone and Sunstein as teachers and they are great men, but even with my personal bias for them, this is still a poorly written casebook. I used it for two classes - one that covered Equal Protection and one over the structure of government. The section of the book on Equal Protection isn't too bad. It has some nice historical material, and most people are already somewhat familiar with the cases anyway. However, the section of the book on government structure and the commerce clause is truly attrocious. The cases aren't well edited. Sometimes the result of a case will turn on a statute and the text and even title of that statute will have been edited out. Its hard to tell what is important from the cases consequently. There are long strings of cites in cases and the notes after the cases are cramped with no real headings and hard to make heads or tales of. Half the time you can't tell why you are reading a case - what your supposed to be getting out of it and how it relates to the other cases you've read.
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