Law and Justice

The second edition of Law and Justice, while retaining the overall structure and themes of the first edition, includes substantial changes in the material and its organization.

The first third of the materials, concerning the "Rule of Law" virtues, has been reorganized and enriched with additional material addressing statutory interpretation and the doctrine of precedent. The materials on procedural justice have been trimmed and moved forward in the text in order to make connections with the substance-neutral claims of legal process. The materials on substantive justice have been reorganized and supplemented in order to make more vivid the tension between liberalism and its critics. Nance concludes the text by turning to the question of the duty of obedience to law, and the topic is given greater immediacy, especially for law students, with the addition of material concerning the challenging issue of the lawyer's duties in advising clients who are contemplating acts that would violate the law.

The second edition retains the pedagogy of the first: significant readings from important scholars are coupled with a relatively small number (twenty-three) or minimally edited principal cases. The emphasis is on sustained arguments rather than "snippets" of insight.