Books about Jurisprudence from Amazon.com

• If you want to eat, you have to work.

• If you have children, you'd better support them.

• If you break the law, you have to pay.

• If you tap the public purse, you'd better be accountable

Now she abandons all judicial restraint in a scathing critique of the system--filled with realistic hard-nosed alternatives to our bloated welfare bureaucracy and our soft-on-crime laws..
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It also provides the most up-to-date content review, including strategies and practice for the new Comparative Reading passage set.

This invaluable guide features:

• NEW! All samples and practice questions are OFFICIAL LSAT questions!
• NEW! Strategies and practice for the new Comparative Reading passage set
• 3 OFFICIAL LSAT practice tests from the test maker
• 2 additional full-length practice tests on CD-ROM
• Detailed answer explanations
• Fresh practice questions delivered monthly
• Downloadable content for PDAs and cellphones
• Personalized online progress report that adapts to a student's goals and schedule

A distinguished and experienced appellate court judge, Richard A. Posner offers in this new book a unique and, to orthodox legal thinkers, a startling perspective on how judges and justices decide cases. When conventional legal materials enable judges to ascertain the true facts of a case and apply clear pre-existing legal rules to them, Posner argues, they do so straightforwardly; that is the domain of legalist reasoning. However, in non-routine cases, the conventional materials run out and judges are on their own, navigating uncharted seas with equipment consisting of experience, emotions, and often unconscious beliefs. In doing so, they take on a legislative role, though one that is confined by internal and external constraints, such as professional ethics, opinions of respected colleagues, and limitations imposed by other branches of government on freewheeling judicial discretion. Occasional legislators, judges are motivated by political considerations in a broad and sometimes a narrow sense of that term. In that open area, most American judges are legal pragmatists. Legal pragmatism is forward-looking and policy-based. It focuses on the consequences of a decision in both the short and the long term, rather than on its antecedent logic. Legal pragmatism so understood is really just a form of ordinary practical reasoning, rather than some special kind of legal reasoning.

Supreme Court justices are uniquely free from the constraints on ordinary judges and uniquely tempted to engage in legislative forms of adjudication. More than any other court, the Supreme Court is best understood as a political court.