Faculty Books

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California School Law

Margaret Dalton and Dean T. Adams

California School Law provides an accessible, comprehensive source for the latest law and policy in this rapidly changing and critical field. Earlier editions of the book, authored by Frank Kemerer and Peter Sansom, have become coveted desktop references for administrators, governing board members, education attorneys, union leaders, and policymakers. In this updated and expanded fourth edition, Dean T. Adams and Margaret A. Dalton bring this analysis up to the present, including examining California's often unique state law as well as applicable federal law, and exploring how they combine to affect the day-to-day operation of the state's traditional public, charter, and private schools.

Beginning with an explanation of the legal framework for California schooling, the book moves quickly to examine important areas of law including curriculum, teacher and student rights of expression, religion in the public school setting, racial and gender discrimination, students with disabilities, student discipline, privacy, search and seizure, and legal liability in both state and federal court. Also included are chapters on unions and collective bargaining, employment, and educational finance issues.

Law never stands still and is proceeding at a record pace in education. This book is an invaluable tool for readers who wish to obtain a working knowledge of this extensive area of education law.
Sentencing Discretion and the Constitution: Due Process of Time

Donald A. Dripps

The U.S. Supreme Court maintains that prosecutorial discretion to charge different offenses authorized by the penal code is practically limited only by the penal code itself. Because typical offense conduct violates multiple statutes carrying different maximum—and minimum—sentences, by choosing the charge, the prosecution commonly also chooses the sentence. The Court, however, holds that when judges exercise sentencing discretion, due process requires impeccable neutrality and adversary hearings.

Sentencing Discretion and the Constitution: Due Process of Time addresses the fundamental incompatibility of the U.S. Supreme Court's approach to the sentencing power of judges as compared to prosecutors. The Court says that when prosecutors induce a guilty plea by filing lesser charges than the code allows, the defendant is getting a break rather than being strong-armed. This doctrinal fiction persists because neither dissenting justices nor academic critics have yet justified a baseline by which the infliction of years—or even decades—in prison for refusing to plead guilty or to provide information, should be treated as a coercive threat rather than an offer permitted in the "give and take" of plea bargaining. In theory, the charges filed should be proportional to culpability, not the most severe the code permits. This raises another hard problem: theorists have not to date advanced a persuasive account of proportionate punishment.

Unlike prior works, Sentencing Discretion and the Constitution exposes the connections between these problems and proposes a unified solution. The right against excessive punishment, like the right against erroneous conviction, is best understood as a right to procedural justice. More broadly, curtailing prosecutorial sentencing is an essential step toward curtailing mass incarceration—a problem that otherwise is more likely to get worse than better.

This book will be of interest to readers concerned with plea bargaining, sentencing, constitutional law, legal history, and criminal law theory.
Trademarks and Free Speech: Conflicts and Resolutions

Lisa P. Ramsey

This book explores how trademark laws can conflict with the right to freedom of expression and proposes a framework for evaluating free speech challenges to trademark registration and enforcement laws. It also explains why granting trademark rights in informational terms, political messages, widely used phrases, decorative product features, and other language and designs with substantial pre-existing communicative value can harm free expression and fair competition. Lisa P. Ramsey encourages governments to not register or protect broad trademark rights in these types of inherently valuable expression. She also recommends that trademark statutes explicitly allow certain informational, expressive, and decorative fair uses of another's trademark, and proposes other speech-protective and pro-competitive reforms of trademark law for consideration by legislatures, courts, and trademark offices in the United States, Europe, and other countries.
Wrongful Convictions: Cases and Materials

Justin Brooks

Wrongful Convictions: Cases and Materials is the first legal textbook to explore the complex and fascinating legal and scientific issues involved in wrongful convictions and the exoneration of the innocent. This exciting area of the law is developing at a rapid pace as we learn more about the causes of wrongful conviction with each exoneration. The book is designed to teach about procedure related to the cases, as well as give a broad overview of the causes of wrongful convictions including false eyewitness testimony, false confessions, ineffective assistance of counsel, police and prosecutorial misconduct, and false forensic evidence. In this fourth edition, there have been significant updates to the cases from the previous edition, including an additional chapter on wrongful conviction civil suits.
Criminal Law and Procedure, Cases and Materials

Donald A. Dripps, Ronald N. Boyce, and Rollin M. Perkins

The 15th Edition continues the book's commitment to offering the most comprehensive, rigorous, and flexible materials on the American criminal process. With respect to the substantive criminal law, the new edition includes:
- Full case treatment of new cases from the Supreme Court, including City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson, 144 S.Ct. 2202 (2024) (rejecting an Eighth Amendment challenge to an ordinance prohibiting sleeping in public), Ruan v. United States, 597 U.S. 450 (2022) (requiring proof of scienter to convict a doctor of felony drug trafficking), and Ramos v. Louisiana, 590 U.S. 83 (2020) (holding that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates not just the Sixth Amendment right to jury trial, but also the requirement that the jury be unanimous to convict), together with a much-condensed presentation of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022) (Roe is overruled; what now about Lawrence?);
- Important new lower courts cases on the void-for-vagueness doctrine, the Second Amendment, homicide, and insanity;
- An update to the causation section;
- The addition, to Chapter 11, of a brief new Section 6 on Executive Clemency;
- A focus on cases that reflect topical issues, including homelessness, gun rights, reproductive rights, drug sales causing death, and parental liability for mass shootings by their minor children;
- A pervasive effort to condense material, either by cutting some material from cases as they appeared in the Fourteenth Edition, or substituting newer and shorter cases for older and longer ones.
The Conscience of Care: Navigating Health in the Culture Wars

Dov Fox

Amid historic restrictions on abortion, puberty blockers, and assisted suicide, a health-law expert exposes America’s broken system of medical conscience, which shields clinicians who refuse evidence-based care yet offers no protections to those who provide prohibited treatment.

Pitched battles over abortion, puberty blockers, and assisted suicide have turned American healthcare into a legal minefield. Faced with mounting restrictions on medical practice, doctors and nurses who follow their conscience to provide standard treatments risk being fined, fired, or even imprisoned, while clinicians who conscientiously deny evidence-based care are shielded without condition from any such consequences. Dov Fox argues that by ceding the moral vocabulary of conscience to refusers alone, the lopsided law of medical conscience selectively burdens providers, drives vulnerable patients underground, and impoverishes the dynamic pluralism of medicine.

The Conscience of Care lays bare the broken system of medical conscience and sets out to fix it. Fox canvases a landscape of contested services that include IVF, IUDs, opioids, psychedelics, organ transplants, and advance directives. He develops practical reforms that rebalance conscience protection by introducing measured safeguards for providers and scaling back the categorical refuge afforded to refusers. The Conscience of Care articulates a bold vision of medicine that reclaims the lost promise of conscience to bridge social divides on matters of life and death, impairment and identity.
You Might Go to Prison, Even Though You’re Innocent

Justin Brooks

Justin Brooks has spent his career freeing innocent people from prison. With You Might Go to Prison, Even Though You're Innocent, he offers up-close accounts of the cases he has fought, embedding them within a larger landscape of innocence claims and robust research on what we know about the causes of wrongful convictions.

Putting readers at the defense table, this book forces us to consider how any of us might be swept up in the system, whether we hired a bad lawyer, bear a slight resemblance to someone else in the world, or are not good with awkward silence. The stories of Brooks's cases and clients paint the picture of a broken justice system, one where innocence is no protection from incarceration or even the death penalty. Simultaneously relatable and disturbing, You Might Go to Prison, Even Though You're Innocent is essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand how injustice is served by our system.
A Short & Happy Guide to the MPRE

Leah Christensen

This Short and Happy Guide provides students with the essential concepts and overarching themes that are most frequently tested on the MPRE. The Guide covers the rules of professional responsibility giving students the best introduction they can have as they begin their exam preparation.
International Business Negotiations in a Nutshell

Ralph Folsom and Herbert I. Lazerow

International Business Negotiations in a Nutshell is designed for legal, business, and international studies. It first explains why international business negotiations are strikingly different from domestic negotiations. This Nutshell introduces the basics of negotiating international business transactions, then moves to specific negotiations of international sales agreements, letters of credit, foreign sales agents and distributors, international franchise agreements, international technology transfer agreements, foreign investment agreements, fundamentals and negotiation of international dispute settlement, negotiating choice of forum and choice of law clauses, and finally negotiating exit clauses in international business agreements.
Corporate Income Tax Accounting

Christopher H. Hanna, Paul H. Yong, and Mark P. Thomas

Accounting for income taxes has become a critically important issue for both financial accounting and income taxation purposes in recent years. However, there is nothing new about the need to account for income taxes for purposes of presenting, or to opine upon, the financial accounts of corporations or other business entities. The process of accounting for tax matters has been a traditional aspect of the responsibilities of finance and taxation officers of business entities, particularly publicly traded corporations, for many years.

The nature of the process has long been familiar. In essence, there are a number of parties in this process: (i) business entities, (ii) tax administrations, (iii) financial accounting standards organizations, (iv) auditors of the business entities, and (v) tax strategists seeking to achieve overall tax/finance results for business entities. Each party has its own interests.

The purpose of this text is to discuss and explain the pertinent elements of the intersection of financial accounting and taxation. The goal is to: (i) articulate the reality of financial accounting and tax compliance in light of the new landscape entities face on such matters today; and (ii) set out a means by which entities can structure their tax planning and financial reporting in a manner to efficiently meet all applicable requirements. Key differentiators in the text are liberal use of numerical examples, excerpts from companies’ financial statements, and opinions on murky issues due to the complex and dynamic interdependence of financial accounting and income tax principles.
Mastering International Sales Law

Herbert I. Lazerow

This book is designed for the law student studying international sales contracts and for the many lawyers who want a quick introduction to the area. The field is of growing importance. In 1960 and 1970, the sum of U.S. imports and exports of goods constituted 6% and 8% of U.S. gross domestic product. In 1980 and 1990, that percentage rose to 17% and 15%. In the last three decades, the ratio of the value of imports plus exports to gross domestic product has hovered around 20%.

The principal focus is on the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. The number of countries adhering to CISG now stands at 95. It includes all top seven trading countries (China, United States, Germany, Netherlands, Japan, Hong Kong and France) measured in total imports and exports. In addition to analyzing CISG, the book provides an introduction to two other topics of importance to international sales contracts: letters of credit and the U.S. income tax consequences of international sales.
Patent Law: An Open-Source Casebook

Ted Sichelman

Less than a handful of casebooks are truly open source, in the sense of being fully modifiable. Patent Law: An Open-Source Casebook is the first patent law casebook that provides adopting professors, students, and others the ability to fully modify its contents. This file comprises the casebook in its entirety, including the cover, table of contents, preface, and chapters covering historical and economic perspectives on patent law, an overview of the modern patent system, the patent document and its claims, subject matter eligibility, utility, disclosure, anticipation, obviousness, infringement, defenses, remedies, prosecution, challenges, ownership, and licensing.
The disintegrating conscience and the decline of modernity

Steven Douglas Smith

Steven D. Smith’s books are always anticipated with great interest by scholars, jurists, and citizens who see his work on foundational questions surrounding law and religion as shaping the debate in profound ways. Now, in The Disintegrating Conscience and the Decline of Modernity, Smith takes as his starting point Jacques Barzun’s provocative assertion that “the modern era” is coming to an end. Smith considers the question of decline by focusing on a single theme—conscience—that has been central to much of what has happened in Western politics, law, and religion over the past half-millennium. Rather than attempting to follow that theme step-by-step through five hundred years, the book adopts an episodic and dramatic approach by focusing on three main figures and particularly portentous episodes: first, Thomas More’s execution for his conscientious refusal to take an oath mandated by Henry VIII; second, James Madison’s contribution to Virginia law in removing the proposed requirement of religious toleration in favor of freedom of conscience; and, third, William Brennan’s pledge to separate his religious faith from his performance as a Supreme Court justice. These three episodes, Smith suggests, reflect in microcosm decisive turning points at which Western civilization changed from what it had been in premodern times to what it is today. A commitment to conscience, Smith argues, has been a central and in some ways defining feature of modern Western civilization, and yet in a crucial sense conscience in the time of Brennan and today has come to mean almost the opposite of what it meant to Thomas More. By scrutinizing these men and episodes, the book seeks to illuminate subtle but transformative changes in the commitment to conscience—changes that helped to bring Thomas More’s world to an end and that may also be contributing to the disintegration of (per Barzun) “the modern era.”
Universal basic income: What everyone needs to know

Matt Zwolinski and Miranda Perry Fleischer

The motivating idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) is radically simple: give people cash and let them do whatever they want with it. But does this simple idea have the potential to radically transform our society? Is a UBI the ultimate solution to the problem of poverty? Is it the solution to automation-induced unemployment? Can it help solve gender and racial inequality?

This book provides the average citizen with all the information they need to understand current debates about the UBI. It recounts the history of the idea, from its origins in the writings of 18th century radical intellectuals to contemporary discussions centered on unemployment caused by technological advances such as artificial intelligence. It discusses current pilot programs in the United States and around the world, including how much (or little) we can learn from such experiments about how a large-scale UBI would fare in the real world. It explores both the promises and pitfalls of a UBI, taking seriously the arguments of both supporters and detractors. It also explains why the UBI has attracted supporters from all across the ideological spectrum--from conservatives to liberals, libertarians to socialists--and what the implications of this fact are for its political future.
Diversity judgments : democratizing judicial legitimacy

Roy L. Brooks

The US Supreme Court's legitimacy-its diminishing integrity and contribution to the good of society-is being questioned today like no other time in recent memory. Criticisms reflect the perspectives of both 'insiders' (straight white males) and 'outsiders' (mainly people of color, women, and the LGBTQ community). Neither perspective digs deep enough to get at the root of the Court's legitimacy problem, which is one of process. The Court's process of decision-making is antiquated and out of sync with a society that looks and thinks nothing like the America of the eighteenth century, when the process was first implemented. The current process marginalizes many Americans who have a right to feel disenfranchised. Leading scholar of jurisprudence Roy L. Brooks demonstrates how the Court can modernize and democratize its deliberative process, to be more inclusive of the values and life experiences of Americans who are not straight white males.
The equality machine : harnessing digital technology for a brighter, more inclusive future

Orly Lobel

Much has been written about the challenges tech presents to equality and democracy. But we can either criticize big data and automation or steer it to do better. Lobel makes a compelling argument that while we cannot stop technological development, we can direct its course according to our most fundamental values. With provocative insights in every chapter, Lobel masterfully shows that digital technology frequently has a comparative advantage over humans in detecting discrimination, correcting historical exclusions, subverting long-standing stereotypes, and addressing the world’s thorniest problems: climate, poverty, injustice, literacy, accessibility, speech, health, and safety. Lobel's vivid examples—from labor markets to dating markets—provide powerful evidence for how we can harness technology for good. The book’s incisive analysis and elegant storytelling will change the debate about technology and restore human agency over our values.
Principles of Remedies Law

Russell L. Weaver and Michael B. Kelly

This book is written in a student-friendly style designed to facilitate learning and comprehension. The book contains the latest decisions from the United States Supreme Court and the lower federal and state courts.
Advanced Introduction to Legal Reasoning

Larry Alexander and Emily Sherwin

This insightful and highly readable Advanced Introduction provides a succinct, yet comprehensive, overview of legal reasoning, covering both reasoning from canonical texts and legal decision-making in the absence of rules. Overall, it argues that there are only two methods by which judges decide legal disputes: deductive reasoning from rules and unconstrained moral, practical, and empirical reasoning.
International trade, beyond Trump, in a nutshell

Ralph H. Folsom

This Nutshell examines the economics and rules governing international trade, with special emphasis on global and U.S. trade agreements in the disruptive Trump tariff war era.

After introductory chapters on trade transactions and cross-border enterprises, it analyzes the World Trade Organization (WTO) package of agreements, Trump blockage of WTO dispute settlement, regulation of imports (including customs law), and trade remedy responses to import competition. Export controls, foreign corrupt practices, preferential free trade and customs union agreements, technology transfers and a chapter on Beyond Trump and Trade follow. Trade policy alternatives are discussed and highlighted as Biden Impacts throughout this Nutshell.
A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education

Gail Heirot and Maimon Schwarzchild

Is higher education on the right road? The authors of these eight essays are hardly the first to think not.

In 1976, in the now-famous Bakke case, the California Supreme Court had to decide whether what some view as the “good kind” of race discrimination—preferential treatment for minorities in college and university admissions—violates the Constitution. To Justice Stanley Mosk, up to then considered by many to be a civil rights hero, the answer was clear. Writing for the majority, he insisted: “To uphold [the University of California’s argument for race-preferential admissions] would call for the sacrifice of principle for the sake of dubious expediency and would represent a retreat in the struggle to assure that each man and woman shall be judged on the basis of individual merit alone.”

Alas, the university took its case up to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the Justices fractured into three camps. The result was to open the door to more than a half-century of “diversity” admissions.

These policies have never been popular. When voters get the opportunity to vote them down, they almost always do, beginning with California’s Proposition 209 in 1996. In 2020, California voters shocked that state’s political and business elite by decisively rejecting an effort by the legislature—known as Proposition 16—to repeal Proposition 209.

But voters in most states never get that opportunity.

At this late date, getting back on the right road—away from group preferences and from the cultural changes they have wreaked on campus—won’t be easy. Yet, as the essays in this volume demonstrate, it needs to be done—sooner better than later.
Fictions, Lies and the Authority of Law

Steven D. Smith

Is there any connection linking some of the maladies of modern life—“cancel culture,” the climate of mendacity in public and academic life, fierce conflicts over the Constitution, disputes over presidential authority? Fictions, Lies, and the Authority of Law argues that these diverse problems are all a consequence of what Hannah Arendt described as the disappearance of authority in the modern world. In this perceptive study, Steven D. Smith offers a diagnosis explaining how authority today is based in pervasive fictions and how this situation can amount to, as Arendt put it, “the loss of the groundwork of the world.”
Transnational Law and Practice: Cases and Materials

Donald Earl Childress III, Michael Ramsey, and Christopher A. Whytock

Transnational Law and Practice emphasizes the knowledge and skills that students need to solve the real-world transnational legal problems they are likely to encounter as lawyers in today’s globalized world—regardless of their field of practice and regardless of whether they are interested in international law as such. The casebook covers public international law and international courts; but unlike traditional international law casebooks, it urges students not to be “international law-centric” or “international court-centric” and gives them the resources to learn how to use national law and national courts, and private norms and alternative dispute resolution methods, to solve transnational legal problems on behalf of their clients.
Criminal Procedure: Rights and Remedies in Police Investigations

Donald A. Dripps

This casebook on investigative criminal procedure takes a fresh and uniquely contemporary doctrinal approach. It begins with enough history to enable students to follow the historical arguments that pervade the Supreme Court’s great landmarks. Those landmarks receive extensive coverage. Scholarly lower-court opinions, however, often are used as force-multipliers, to synthesize and apply the ever-growing Supreme Court case law. Many of these opinions arose from civil actions, illustrating Section 1983 litigation even before the extensive chapter on constitutional remedies. That chapter deals with the exclusionary rule, but also with 1983 and Bivens suits. Institutional reform injunctions—the most dramatic development in the field in decades—receive extensive treatment. Brief but detailed Notes introduce pertinent academic literature, including empirical findings on stop-and-frisk and institutional reform injunctions, systemic feedback loops, the philosophical basis of the privilege against self-incrimination, and the role of race—past and present—in the law of criminal procedure.

Prior books emphasize the Supreme Court’s decisions applying the constitutional exclusionary rules. This understandable focus comes at a price. Too little attention is paid to the origins of our constitutional rights or to remedies for institutional violence as distinct from invasions of privacy. The prevailing focus on the e-rule risks devoting the whole course to only part (admittedly a very important part) of the law.
The USMCA: NAFTA re-negotiated and its business implications in a nutshell

Ralph H. Folsom and W. Davis Folsom

No lawyer or business operating in North America can escape the significance of NAFTA and its successor, the USMCA agreement of 2018. This Nutshell introduces students, lawyers, government officials and business persons to the law and economics of North American free trade. It first examines the origins, operation and impact of NAFTA 1994. The changes made by the USMCA agreement of 2018, and their implications for business, are explored in detail. In preparing this Nutshell, we have attempted to address the interests not only of North Americans, but also persons located outside the region who are concerned about the externalities of North American free trade, intellectual property and foreign investment law.
International business transactions in a nutshell

Ralph H. Folsom, Michael P. Van Alstine, and Michael D. Ramsey

This work examines the law and practices relevant to the principal forms of international business and commercial transactions. It includes chapters on negotiating business transactions; the law governing international sales of goods; structuring international sales transactions; the function and substance of international commercial terms; the law governing the international transportation of goods; financing international business transactions, especially through letters of credit; electronic transactions and the protection of data privacy; technology transfers; the initiation, operation, and termination of, as well as the limitations imposed on, foreign investments; property takings, including the options for protecting against and remedies for such actions; the extraterritorial regulation of international business; anti-corruption law; and the resolution of international disputes, whether through litigation in domestic court or through international arbitration.