Legal Books

This book is both an excellent primer on small business legal issues and an invaluable resource for deriving maximum value from your lawyer. You will value it for the expertise and introduction to the questions you didn't know to ask. Your lawyer will appreciate having a more informed client. As a family business consultant, I make sure my clients have a copy of this on their bookshelf.

Michael Stern, PhD
Brookfield, CT

I found this book extremely helpful! A copy should be on everyone's bookshelf whether he or she owns a business or not. It is an important reference.

Navigating the relationship with your lawyer can be a very frustrating and intimidating experience. This book clarifies important issues, and gives realistic guidelines for choosing a lawyer and communicating with the person you choose.

I know I will refer to it often.

Every small or medium size business owner or decision maker should read Krasnow's book. It won't tell you how to solve your legal problems, but it will realistically explain how the law, and lawyers, work.

After reading it, you'll be able to intelligently choose the right lawyer for your business and evaluate his or her advice. It will also explain how to effectively manage your lawyer when they're working for you, and how to get the most for your legal fees.

Krasnow's comments, especially regarding family owned businesses and potential ownership and succession problems, reflect extensive experience and knowledge. His recommended solutions come across as sound, reasonable and fair.

At some point, whether for contract creation, litigation or sale and/or succession, every business will need legal advice and services. It makes sense to make an informed choice of lawyers to furnish this advice. This book will help you do so.

I bought this book in high school school in 1956 for a Problems in American Democracy course. I have used it in high school, college Constitutional Law courses, law school courses and the practice of law. It breaks the Constitution down almost word for word and restates it in easy, simple layman's terms. It tells you why the phrase is there, what the citizen gives up under it and what the citizen receives in benefits from it. It alows you to find and understand specific sections of the Constitution and how they apply to you. Every American should have and study this book. It is the best simple explination of this complex subject I have ever seen. The fact that it is out of print and not available, particularly to young students, is a sorry comment on our society.

I borrowed this book from the Library and love it so much I wanted to buy one to keep readily available. I hope somebody decides to reprint this one. I'd love a copy of my own. It breaks down the Constitution into bite sized pieces into something even I can understand.

As a young boy - nobody could believe the a family member of mine wrote this book. I used it in government class in Junior High and High School in the 1970's. This book should still be required reading by every student in the United States

David Findlay Stafford

This book is a pleasure to get through and does an excellent job assessing the current state of tax reform. His competitive tax plan makes quite a bit of sense too. Shifting a good portion of federal revenue to a VAT takes over 150 million individuals off the IRS rolls and simplifies the entire system. I worry that the implementation process would be too complicated to reap the benefits of the simpler system, and that this plan lacks the proper advocates in Congress, but that does not mean you shouldn't read this book and understand his plan. The VAT is a tried and true system throughout the EU, and could help the US in numerous ways.

Michael Graetz makes tax policy almost enjoyable. Graetz never forgets that the tax system's primary purpose is to raise the money needed to finance the government services that the nation wants in the least harmful way. Or, as the French economist Colbert put it, "The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing." Graetz provides a realistic assessment of our current tax structure and deftly identifies the failings of faddish proposals, such as the "fair tax" and the "flat tax." His proposal to reduce the number of people required to pay income tax and to add a value-added tax to our nation's fiscal arsenal deserves serious consideration by conservatives and liberals alike.

Paul N. Van de Water

I saw this book last week at a tradeshow in Cannes, France (3GSM World Congress) and I was blown away. I never realized the extent of how similar to my Windows PC my non-Windows smartphone (Nokia 7610) is! The book outlines cool tricks like copy/paste and also gives tips on applications users can buy and install to their phone after they begin using it. Believe me, the price is minimal for the value included in this book!

I'm a corporate IT professional and smartphone user. I've been looking for a Series 60 smartphone book as a basis for training our staff and helping them become more efficient. For the longest time there was nothing...and then I discovered this. I can't express how happy I am with this book. It's much more than a "Missing Manual." In fact, it's incredibly rich and useful, and the add-on applications it covers illustrate how to get even more "smartness" from smartphones, a point that the manufacturers haven't yet adequately communicated to the general public. Superb book!

A very comprehensive and informative guide to polygraph proceedure and validity. Full of case studies ,scientific research and guidelines to how to conduct a polygraph test. This is full of very useful information for anyone for or against the use of polygraph. Put in an easy to follow common sense approach. A must for students of Psychophysiology.

The best of all the Guru's in one book.

From the father of Positivism, this book explores the true nature of the norm and the role it plays in relation to state and society. Excellent analysis of positivist normativity.

You should also consider reading The Pure Theory of Law, by Kelsen, as well as books by Rawls, Nozick, MacIntyre, and Posner.

This book rediscovers the most important elements of Law, provinding Neo-Kantian theory aplied to Law and State. Altough, it is one of the most important law books written in the 20th Century, one must prior have read "The Pure Theory of law" in order to come about to a thorough understanding of this manificent pice of art. It has been heavilly criticized by those who follow "The Naturist Theory" and mostly by dogmatic waves, including the Catholic Church, for it proves that relativism refers to Democracy and Republic, and dogmaticism referes to Dictatorship.

I'm no expert with computers or Windows XP, but after reading this book I feel like I'm getting there. The techniques described are truly fast and useful. I don't have much time for reading, so I go through one or two new techniques each morning. This has been time well spent, and has made me much more efficient on my PC.

If you are a complete XP novice, get familiar with XP before trying these techniques. They are not difficult, but you need to be at least familiar with XP. This book offers a wide variety of important, but hard to find, techniques that are indispensible to XP Power Users.

Keith Underdahl takes you through many techniques to accomplish incredible feats of control and configuration using a step-by-step instruction method that is very easy to follow. This book covers everything from installing and booting multiple Operating Systems, calibrating battery percentage (on notebooks), Managing, protecting and customising nearly every XP feature and interface, and enhancing the power of the system with free add-ons and easy user adjustments, tweaks, and techniques - Keith even covers how to make home movies on your PC!

This book is a "must have" for every XP power user. As a Developer, I've got dozens of books on XP tweaks, tricks, and technical magic - but none of them have this much immediately useable information, or contain as many useful Power-User techniques. This is my all-time favorite XP Power User book.

The cover says it all. This book gives the pertinent facts on all of the ABA approved schools. It also gives a brief summary of law school and the field of law. It does not rank the schools in an arbitrary matter. It gives you the data so you can rank them yourself.

If you're applying to law school (or are thinking about it), and you only get one book to research American Law Schools, get this one--trust me. You get four pages on every ABA approved law school (which are, really, the only schools one should be concerned with--with very few exceptions). Two pages of stats listing nearly all of the valuable information that you want to know, and also lots of information that you should know (but might not realize). Also two pages where the law school writes about itself. This book's information is probably more accurate, complete, and up to date than that in other publications (nearly all of which I've all read). The LSAC gives you the stats (so they are directly from the authority), and the law schools give you their spiel (which may be good and bad). Check it out. NOTE: Make sure you get the most current edition, they print a new one every year.

This is a very difficult book to pigeonhole. It isn't really a "biography" in the typical sense, and yet it does indeed tell the story of Lincoln in a unique, fascinating, and clever way, that is, Anastaplo explains Lincoln in terms of his philosophy, mindset, and outlook as these evolved over the course of his life as seen through the lens of his words and actions. To me there is no better way to explain or know somebody than identifying and understanding what philosophical underpinnings guided their words and actions. We are all guided ultimately, whether we admit it or not, by our worldview (i.e. the collective sum of our beliefs, opinions, and perceptions of reality). What a person believes about any number of foundational questions of human existence (existence of God, human value, equality, morality, etc.) defines who they are, and it is these things that guides ones words and actions, and it is consequently these words and actions that Anastaplo brings to the fore to give us an engrossing account of one of the most fascinating and brilliant human beings in history. Anastaplo never says the equivalent of, "Lincoln believed such and such...", but rather lets you glean that for yourself based on Lincoln's evolution of thought and word. Although Anastaplo does help "frame" the discussion of Lincoln in a philosophical context by providing some helpful background info and by culling the pertinent details of Lincoln's life such that the reader has a firm foundation from which to ponder Lincoln's mindset and how that mindset provoked his subsequent words and actions, he (Anastaplo) never attempts to spoon-feed or dogmatize.

Ever wonder: So what's the big deal with Lincoln? Anastaplo gives the answer. You cannot help but come away with an almost reverential regard for Lincoln, not because he was so "good" or because he was so much better than anybody else, but because you see in Lincoln all the flaws, contradictions, and insecurities that plague us all. Lincoln was by no means perfect, as none of us are, but despite his flaws Lincoln shows us a profound picture of greatness in his patience, eloquence, and ability to learn from and reflect upon life and use the gifts we've been given to strive for good. In short, its all the things that make a hero a hero. A hero isn't a hero because he/she is perfect but because they are great despite imperfection. But I digress...

This book is essentially a collection of essays Anastaplo wrote and lectured on over the course of his career. But don't let that dissuade you from reading. There is undeniable continuity and cohesion such that the essays seem to flow naturally into one another without unnecessarily overlapping or regurgitating other portions of the the book. I will warn however, that while this book isn't terribly long it is dense and requires effort. I found myself having to focus with an unusual amount of concentration, not because Anastaplo is cumbersome or because what he says is so difficult to understand, but because the nature of the material prompts and requires a huge amount of thought and reflection...and I LOVED it.

Of all the books I've ever read this one remains in my top ten and I have no doubt that I will dip into it again and again over the course of my life, and in fact already have. If you are a seeker and love American history, do yourself a favor and read this book. You will be challenged and you will learn as much about yourself as about Abraham Lincoln.

Despite the fact that this book is in fact a compilation of essays written over a nearly forty year period, it possesses a unity and coherence that would put many other works of "scholarship' to shame. Anastaplo is an amazingly learned, thoughtful,and spiritually sensitive man. He is also that rarity, an INTELLIGENT patriot. One cannot help but think, reading his reflections on Lincoln and the founding, that he would have made a superb addition to the Supreme Court, despite the fact that he The Illinois State Bar , deeming him a 'security risk"(!!), refused to grant him permission to practice law back during the McCarthy era. He certainly understands the constitution better than several of the Justices.

This is an excellent, short alternative to bigger and more well-known textbooks on crimes against humanity. It's very scholary, well-researched, and offers the case study of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. It addresses many theoretical as well as practical issues of international law. It lists (p. 77) crimes against humanity as murder, extermination, enslavement, forced labor, deportation and unjustified or cruel forced population transfers, imprisonment, torture, rape and other forms of sexual abuse, inhumane acts constituting severe attacks on the human person, persecution that denies basic human rights, certain severe deprivations of property, and disappearances without proof of murder. Without being overly legalistic, the book goes into how to investigate and prosecute such crimes which would be very useful for those seeking greater "accountability" in the world today.

Abrams and Ratner provide an excellent in depth review of the legal and moral difficulties in bringing perpertrators of genocide to justice.