Constitutional Law for a Changing America: Rights, Liberties, and Justice

Book by Epstein, Lee, Walker, Thomas G.

This new edition of Rights, Liberties, and Justice is part of the innovative, highly successful two-volume text that blends the best of legal and political science approaches to constitutional law. Lee Epstein and Thomas G. Walker have carefully selected excerpts from important cases and have provided extensive commentary to help students follow the path of the evolving law.

While Epstein and Walker excerpt in the traditional manner both new and classic cases that best illustrate the development of constitutional law, their approach is distinctive in that it also recognizes the political factors that influence judicial decisions. They emphasize the arguments raised by lawyers and interest groups, and include material that brings out the rich political context in which decisions are made, including the ideological and behavioral inclinations of justices, the politics of judicial selection, and the impact of public opinion and positions taken by elected officials.

The authors draw students into the subject and help them understand why each case is included and how it fits into the development of constitutional doctrine. Students discover that Supreme Court cases are more than just legal names and citations, that they involve real people engaged in real disputes. To further animate the text for students, Epstein and Walker include profiles of influential groups and justices, photographs of litigants, exhibits from the cases, and full descriptions of the events that led to the suits. A helpful appendix includes a glossary of legal terms.

What's New?

The fourth edition of Rights, Liberties, and Justice has been updated throughout to include recent scholarship and key decisions handed down since the publication of the last edition. Also new:

A new chapter (8) on the Second Amendment – the right to bear arms ;

New "Global Perspective" boxes in which the authors compare and contrast U.S. Supreme Court decisions with policies developed in other countries;

"Aftermath" boxes that describe what happened to particular litigants after the Court's rulings.

With the burgeoning of online resources for researching the Supreme Court, Epstein and Walker have included numerous electronic sources throughout the text. Chapter 1, "The Supreme Court and the Constitution," has a new section on how to research the Court using online and print references. Relevant Web site addresses are included throughout, giving readers access to the full opinion for each excerpted case and to the audio recording of oral arguments when available.