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Sure, wikipedia gives you a great summary of how the Constitution works, but here's a crib sheet.

The Constitution establishes the U.S. federal government and describes its powers. Remember that the U.S. federal government has three branches. The first three articles of the Constitution describe the powers and responsibilities of each branch of government.

• Article I concerns the Legislature (Congress). Congress is supposed to have only those powers specifically enumerated in Article I. In practice, certain clauses have been read broadly and Congress today can pass virtually any law that impacts interstate commerce. Congress is a "bi-cameral" legislature meaning that it has two chambers: the House of Representatives and the Senate.
  
  
• Article II describes powers of the Executive Branch (the President). The President is the Head of State and the Commander in Chief of the military. He can veto laws passed by Congress. He can appoint ambassadors, judges, and cabinet members (equivalent of ministers in other systems) with the "advice and consent" of the U.S. Senate.
  
  
• Article III establishes the federal judiciary.
  
  The first ten Amendments to the U.S. Constitution are called the Bill of Rights. Notable amendments are: the First Amendment (freedom of speech, press, religion), the Fifth Amendment (right to remain silent), the Sixth Amendment (right to confront witnesses). These amendments originally only applied to the Federal government but over time they were "incorporated" to the states, meaning that they apply to state laws.
  
  Other important amendments include: the Thirteenth Amendment (abolishment of slavery), the Fourteenth Amendment (due process of law, equal protection clause), the Seventeenth Amendment (direct election of Senators), the Nineteenth Amendment (women's suffrage), and my favorite, the Twenty-First Amendment (end of the Prohibition!).
  
  EDIT: To answer your other questions. I don't know the answers to all your questions so I'll only address some.
  
  Question 1: Article 1, Section 8 describe powers that Congress may exercise. They are certainly not required to do so. For instance, Congress has the power to "raise and support Armies" which means they can fund armies. But they can also decline to fund certain military projects or (maybe) missions.
  
  Question 3: I am not familiar with the legal doctrine you raised, but the answer to whether the federal judiciary can make law is... complicated. Most of the judiciary's work is interpreting statutes and constitutional provisions. However, Congress can certainly overturn a judicial interpretation of a statute by passing another law. Similarly, constitutional amendments can overturn judicial decisions. This has happened several times in U.S. history. For instance, the Dred Scott case (holding that descendents of slaves are not U.S. citizens) was overturned by the Fourteenth Amendment which guarantees U.S. citizenship to anyone born in the United States. Remember that the Constitution is the "highest law of the land" and supersedes any conflicting state or federal law, or judicial opinions.
  
  On occasions Congress has left certain bodies of law to be developed by the courts, to in effect create a common law binding on those topics. The best example of this is antitrust law in the United States. Section 1 of the Sherman Act prohibits agreements and conspiracies "in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States." The huge body of antitrust law was developed almost entirely by the courts over the last one hundred years. Most observers would say that courts have been busy creating new law of antitrust under the umbrella of the Sherman Act.
  
  As for precedent, you have to keep in mind that the federal judiciary has three levels: district courts where cases are first brought (this is where trials happen), Courts of Appeals that hear challenges to the district court decisions, and the Supreme Court which is the highest court. Decisions of the Supreme Court are binding on the lower courts. The Supreme Court is not bound by its prior decisions, but there is a principle of stare decisis which means the Supreme Court will not lightly overturn its prior decisions.
  
  Question 4: The republican form of government mentioned in the Constitution doesn't mean the same thing as the Republican Party today. This clause hasn't been interpreted very often, but it probably prohibits a state from becoming a monarchy, a theocracy, or a dictatorship.
  
  Question 5: For freedom of press, you'll have to read the key Supreme Court topics on it. I suggest New York Times Co. v. United States as a starting point.
  
  Question 6: The Patriot Act is a controversial topic. I suggest you read Rethinking the Patriot Act, written by a NYU law professor, which describes and analyzes the law's key elements. Maybe you can get this through your local library?
  
  Question 7: The Tenth Amendment is an interesting case. Here's an important distinction to keep in mind. States have general police powers which means they can pass laws to regulate health, morals, and safety. They can pass any law as long as it doesn't conflict with federal law, state constitution, or the U.S. Constitution. By contrast, the federal government is one of enumerated powers which means it only has powers specifically granted to it by the Constitution. The U.S. federal system arose from a very unique historical context. The States pre-date the United States, and in the early days of the nation, there was much fierce debate about the proper scope of the federal government. Most states simply did not want a strong federal government and feared that the government created by the Constitution would, over time, usurp the powers of individual states and intrude upon areas traditionally left to state governance. The Tenth Amendment was created to reassure the States that they would not lose all their powers. The Tenth Amendment does not authorize the States to pass their own laws - they already had that power.
  
  States can also pass laws that run parallel to or overlap with federal laws. Let's go back to antitrust. The Sherman Act is a federal antitrust law. But many states have their own antitrust laws that are often more expansive than the federal law. This is fine under the U.S. federal system. But states cannot pass laws that conflict with federal law and they cannot pass laws in fields that have been preempted by federal law. Preemption is a complex issue, but just know that there are certain fields of law that only the federal government can regulate: immigration and patents, for example.
  
  Question 8: You are referring to article 36 of the SA constitution? Subsection (a) seems to say that limitations of rights have to be reasonable in light of certain considerations. The Constitution does not contain such a clause, and in fact, the Bill of Rights often uses categorical language ("Congress shall pass no law..."). But over time the Supreme Court has developed several tests to judge the legality of laws that restrict basic freedoms. For instance, courts use the strict scrutiny to determine whether restrictions on certain fundamental rights pass constitutional scrutiny.
  
  Hope this helps!

> Why aren't all issues of civil rights held to strict scrutiny? Given the US' history of discrimination, what's the philosophical justification for placing some identities in the strict scrutiny basket, and others in heightened/rational basis baskets?

This is a very important question. It all comes down to fraud on the part of the US Supreme Court in a series of cases after the 14th Amendment was passed in 1868. The 14th was supposed to protect a broad swath of civil rights but the US Supreme Court pretended not to know what the meaning of "privileges and immunities of US citizenship" is in the opening paragraph of the 14th:

> All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Problem is, the guy who wrote that (John Bingham, a Republican legislator and top civil rights activist in the US after Lincoln died) said exactly where the meaning of "privileges and immunities" could be found - as defined by the US Supreme Court in 1856 in the nasty Dredd Scott case legalizing racism:

> For if they [referring to blacks] were so received, and entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens, it would exempt them from the operation of the special laws and from the police regulations which they considered to be necessary for their own safety. It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognised as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all of this would be done in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, and inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State.

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=60&invol=393

Note that these listed "privileges and immunities" included basically all of the Bill of Rights including the 2nd Amendment plus some, like the right to "free travel without pass or passport".

The Dredd Scott case was basically the US Supreme Court saying that racism was always a factor in America (up to 1856 at least) and that therefore racist laws were OK. The Civil War (1861-1865) didn't solve this problem. The 14th Amendment was an attempt to write a constitutional amendment to overturn the US Supreme Court and therefore uses the language of Dred Scott to flip it around.

The Supremes didn't take kindly to this and in a series of cases such as Slaughter-House (1872), US v. Cruikshank (1875, final decision in 1876) and many others basically destroyed the whole opening paragraph of the 14th. Burned it to the fucking ground.

It got rebuilt crooked in the 20th century, based on the "due process" clause instead of the "privilege or immunity" portion. The whole idea of "levels of scrutiny" are an artifact of this cockeyed rebuilding process.

For more info, see either or both of the following books:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Bill-Rights-Creation-Reconstruction/dp/0300082770 - gives a good overview of the fraud that the Supreme Court has never come to grips with.

http://www.amazon.com/Day-Freedom-Died-Massacre-Reconstruction/dp/0805089225/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1425676694&sr=1-1&keywords=charles+%22the+day+freedom+died%22 - a more detailed look at the most critical aspect of the fraud, the events surrounding the Colfax Massacre and the Cruikshank decision that resulted.

At various times individual US Supreme Court justices have tried to blow the whistle. Hugo Black's dissent in Adamson (1947) is the most detailed:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Adamson_v._California/Dissent_Black

...but Clarence Thomas of all people went the same place in a concurring dissent in Saenz v. Roe (1999):



"Concurring dissent" means he was OK with the outcome of the case but thought they should have gotten there a different way. In this case California discriminated against US citizens recently arrived in Cali from other US states and this was held to be a violation of their civil rights. Back in 1870 the US Supreme Court said the same thing in Ward v. Maryland, and then in 1872 in Slaughter-House said that the "privileges or immunities" clause of the 14th ONLY protected US citizens against cross-border discrimination. Saenz repeated Ward over 100 years later but Thomas (with Rehnquist agreeing!) said that we should revisit the true meaning of the Privileges and Immunities clause of the 14th.

He was very likely familiar with the arguments Amar and others made on the meaning of the 14th.

Funny thing: the exact quotes from John Bingham cited by Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar on what the opening paragraph of the 14th was supposed to mean were previously quoted in a 1984 book called "Let Every Man Be Armed" by Stephen Halbrook, a law professor from George Mason. Nobody took Halbrook seriously because he was well known as an NRA lawyer. Amar on the other hand is a major "lefty" and highly regarded as a constitutional lawyer; when HE said there was something to this argument that our rights had been gutted by a racist Supreme Court between 1872 and 1900, it was Big Fucking News[tm]. Amar's book was one of the "GO NOW" signals that started the process of bringing major gun-rights cases to the US Supreme Court, leading to the Heller (2008) and McDonald (2010) decisions...which sadly STILL didn't fix the fraud of 1872-1900.

I think if you read the court opinions for Lawrence v. Texas, where the Supreme Court struck down laws criminalizing sodomy, you would have a much better understanding of the issue. They can be found here.

If you find it interesting, you can certainly find more opinions on the issue. Maybe if you're really interested, you can pick up a book on Con law, like this one.

But a lot of what you are asking about is more philosophical and about how one interprets the constitution than it is any type of black letter law, and anything anyone tells you will just be their interpretation of substantive due process.

It's probably just better to go directly to the source and form your own opinion.

The Curmudgeon's Guide to Practicing Law is a good one. Amusing and practical, and very on point. I received it as a gift from one of my mentors early on in my career and thought it was a wonderful aid.

I would also look at templates and examples of court documents on Practical Law's "Standard Documents" portion of its website (along with the website in general). Very, very good baseline materials and law on several important topic areas for the modern practitioner.

The Five Types of Legal Argument is a good primer on what types of arguments are used in the courts that generate case law. Chemerinsky's Constitutional Law is an excellent resource for constitutional law, which is some of the more interesting stuff. The Nine is an easy read and a good introduction to the personalities and major decisions of the Rehnquist court and early Roberts court. Dressler's Understanding Criminal Law is another good one; it explains the general architecture of criminal law and its development. Those might be available at libraries near you. If there's a law library in your area, you can always grab a legal encyclopedia (like American Jurisprudence 2d. or Corpus Juris Secondum) and a Black's Law Dictionary and flip around until you find something interesting. And as others have mentioned, BarBri is a good resource.

Law 101 by Jay Feinman is pretty good.

Making Our Democracy Work by Justice Breyer is a pretty good overview of constitutional law.

I'll probably get down voted for this but... try reading "The Tempting of America" by Robert Bork. Yeah, the controversial conservative judge. An upperclassman suggested I read this during my Con Law class, and it was a much more interesting way to understand a lot of the conservative vs. liberal wrangling over cases like Roe v Wade. I think it will be a good read even if you lean to the left.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Tempting-America-Robert-Bork/dp/0684843374

P.S. good choice of careers. Personally I'm pushing my kids to fields like C.S. versus the law.

"Making Our Democracy Work" by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is a pretty good laymens description of constitutional law.

I think this is a great suggestion. My second suggestion, for a sports fan, would be Legal Bases.

It is not extremely in depth on any one part of law, but it runs the gambit and makes it clear how much the law affects everything. There is contracts law, torts law, anti-trust law, labor law, etc. It also does a good job of describing the basic aspects of each of those fields while mixing in very interesting stories about baseball along the way.

I have not read it for a few years and it may be time to do so again. Favorite assigned reading book of all law school.

Do you want to read CASES or do you want to learn about the entirety of an area of LAW?

If you are more interested in the "whole" view of a certain area of law, I would recommend reading a treatise or something on an area you're interested in. Cases alone are interesting somewhat, but usually they are just a smaller piece of a much bigger topic. It would be like trying to learn about a forest by just studying one tree.

For example if you like Law and Order you probably are interested in criminal law. A book like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Loewys-Criminal-Nutshell-West-Publishing/dp/0314194967/

Would give you a very thorough understanding of criminal law as a whole. Case by case reading might help you understand certain particulars (like the procedure for holding someone in jail in order to pay off outstanding fines) but without being able to see the whole picture it's going to seem really meaningless and confusing.

As many others have noted, bar exam summer isn't exactly a great time to expand your knowledge of the law outside of the review process. So I'd strongly consider suspending your jurisprudential inquiries until after July. Or, at least, being okay if you don't make much progress on the summer reading.

Here is an excellent reading list:

• Alexy, The Argument from Injustice
  
• Dworkin, Law’s Empire
  
• Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights
  
• Fuller, The Morality of Law
  
• Hart, The Concept of Law
  
• Rawls, A Theory of Justice
  
• Rawls, Political Liberalism
  
• Simmonds, Law as a Moral Idea
  
  I'd probably add Holmes' "The Common Law" to that.
  
  And, if you want more breadth, try this compilation of sources
  
  I read both Friedman's first and second books, which were much simpler than the jurisprudential tomes above. But because they're about the history of the law, they're VERY LIKELY to mix things up for the bar exam.
  
  Again, I'd listen to everyone else here, and stay away from real jurisprudential inquiry. Stick with light and silly law-y things (e.g., Jeffrey Toobin) or quick reads (Michael Lewis). Better: don't plan to read much about the law.

> The Obama Administration would be prosecuting the Bush Administration for what were essentially public policy decisions. That sets a precedent nobody wants.

Glenn Greenwald did a great job of breaking down this situation in his book, "With Liberty and Justice for Some." link

That sounds like something that would be in the "... for dummies" series if it weren't a legal topic. I think the Nutshell series is the legal equivalent, but it doesn't quite sound like what you want. Between Black's dictionary and this book though, she might be able to figure out what she needs:

http://www.amazon.com/Contracts-Nutshell-In-West-Publishing/dp/0314169245


And if you aren't familiar with the "... for dummies" series, it's not an insult. They have a series of books that attempt to break concepts/topics down into easy to understand terms. Some are really good books on a topic.

>Can any of you give some advice on some books that a young teen could look into to learn more about the profession and what's involved with it, what types of things she would be studying and such?

It might be a bit advanced for a 13 year old, but A Civil Action is a pretty interesting non-fiction read. It discusses the experience of a litigator in a major trial and the various trials and tribulations that he goes through. I don't remember anything in there that would be inappropriate for a teenager and it is used in high school curriculum.

It might be a bit advanced for an average 13-year-old, but I doubt that an average 13-year-old is actively trying to be a lawyer.

As blackbird17k said, that question is hugely broad. If you're new though and looking to understand how the law works I highly recommend Law's Empire by Ronald Dworkin. http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Empire-Ronald-Dworkin/dp/0674518365

This book is sufficiently detailed to give understanding yet also coherent and enjoyable. Hope you find it helpful.

One thing I meant to recommend and forgot was to buy and read this book:

http://www.amazon.com/History-American-Law-Third-Edition/dp/0684869888/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407940051&sr=8-1&keywords=history+of+american+law

Bryan A. Garner recommends Friedman as a very good legal writer. Also, the content will give you more than a leg up in law school. It presents the entire history of and an explanation of American law. You will go into your classes with a deeper understanding than anyone else. Would make law school a lot easier, I believe.

Also, take some writing courses in undergrad.

To go in a direction other than the "don't go to lawl school!!!!" and super-serious commenters, if you want something accessible to give you some exposure to legal issues, I would absolutely recommend The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin. It's an easy read and a good mix of law and institutional politics.

1. Don't go to law school.
   
   
2. If you insist, anything by Chemerinsky is good for an overview of constitutional law. Dworkin is also interesting and pretty accessible. For an overview of the types of theory you'll learn in torts, check out Coase's The Nature of the Firm (pdf).

A partner at the firm I worked at for the first half of the summer suggested McElhaney's Trial Notebook, and some of the other litigation partners/associates said it was pretty good as well.

McElhaney's Trial Notebook

Put differently: It may have been traditional, but it is now often an indicator of poor-quality paper. And I'm consequently embarassed for reddit for approving such an antiquated practice.

If you're looking for further reading on the matter, this is an excellent typographical guide. I keep it next to my Federal Rules.

Peter Iron's People's History of the Supreme Court for the real history of the law, and Kafka's Metamorphosis for what it feels like to be a law student.

Are you wanting to read substantive legal materials (e.g., what does the First Amendment say?) or about the history of law, or biographies of famous or interesting lawyers, or are you looking for information about what the practice of law is like?

"A Civil Action" might be a reasonable start. http://www.amazon.com/Civil-Action-Jonathan-Harr/dp/0679772677/

I highly recommend the book Law 101:

http://www.amazon.com/Law-101-Everything-American-System/dp/0195395131/ref=pd_sim_b_7

It's written in an easy to understand style. I used chapters as a review for my 1L exams to understand the big picture of what I had been studying.

The Innocent Man. It was largely responsible for the answer that I give when people ask me why I am an ADA- Someone is going to do this job. I trust myself to question, to work, not to slide into laziness or complacency. I don't trust others to do a job this important. I do it because it matters.

But as for why the law in general? When I was in high school I read The Tempting of America. I could not have disagreed with it more strongly. I STILL inherently disagree with basically the entirety of Robert Bork's jurisprudence. However, it was an eye opener- this is what "the law" is about. It showed me that the law can have both big ideas and petty squabbles, and that they can both be equally interesting.

A People's History of the Supreme Court - http://www.amazon.com/A-Peoples-History-Supreme-Court/dp/0140292012

I really enjoyed reading A History of American Law followed by American Law in the Twentieth Century, both by Lawrence Friedman of Stanford Law School.

Check out the book Typography for Lawyers by Matthew Butterick. There is a section in it about what you can do within the limits of pleading requirements that really help readability and presentation.

I used to live by the [Insert Law Subject Here] in a Nutshell series, e.g. Contracts in a Nutshell

They cover dozens of topics, and are always in small paperback form, which is a nice change of pace when one gets sick of carrying 5kg hardbacks to class.

I always thought the series did a nice job of introducing topics in a generalized way and then slowly narrowing the discussion until the details had a solid context.

I’ve always been a fan of the Nutshell series. The fifth edition is the current one: https://www.amazon.com/Criminal-Nutshell-Nutshells-Arnold-Loewy/dp/0314194967/ref=nodl_

Keep in mind that when you get material on criminal law, you are just getting the statutory construction/interpretation of the black letter law. To fully under the system, you also need to delve in evidence, criminal procedure, and Constitutional law (sometimes at advanced levels and multiple jurisdictions).

For entertainment, the best TV show ever was the original Law & Order. The writers would take two or three real cases that were similar and mash them together for each episode. It got a little scary when I could start naming the cases an episode was based on.

I would recommend Law 101 by Jay M. Feinman. It goes into a fair amount of detail about constitutional law, litigation, torts, business law, property law, and criminal law. I think it would be a good starting point for you to decide where you might want to delve a little deeper.

I highly recommend The Curmudgeon's Guide to Practicing Law for BIGLAW associates and summers.

• Typography for Lawyers.
  
  
• The Winning Brief.
  
  
• Legal Writing in Plain English.
  
  Also, get a subscription to the Chicago Manual of Style online. Look up every stylistic question you come across and make no assumptions.

Bryan Garner's Redbook helps me to not sound like an idiot.

Matthew Butterick's Typography for Lawyers helps me to not look like one.

The Redbook sits on my desk, Typography for Lawyers is never far away.

McElhaney's Trial Notebook

Law 101 basically does really short topic overviews of everything a 1L would learn

Mark Herrmann's "The Curmudgeon's Guide to Practicing Law"

http://www.amazon.com/The-Curmudgeons-Guide-Practicing-Law/dp/1590316762

The Curmudgeon's Guide to Practicing Law
http://www.amazon.com/The-Curmudgeons-Guide-Practicing-Law/dp/1590316762

I have learned a lot from this one.

Hahahah, as a 2L I can say this is absolutely true and it was really frustrating to work under 2 partners that had two different viewpoints of the one or two spaces viewpoint.

Btw get this book: http://www.amazon.com/Typography-Lawyers-Matthew-Butterick/dp/1598390775

It's one.