Law Commons^™

Book Reviews, Morris L. Cohen, Judith T. Younger

Vanderbilt Law Review

Dictionary of Legal Abbreviations Used in American Law Books by Doris Bieber

The proliferation of legal sources and abbreviations poses two related problems--first, the need for standardized citation forms,and second, the need for guides to commonly used abbreviations. The first problem has been difficult to solve, and universal acceptance of standard citations is unlikely to be achieved. A Uniform System of Citation, published by the Harvard Law Review Association, in collaboration with the Columbia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal, has attained wide acceptance and has become the authoritative guide for legal citations …

Book Reviews: Ethics At The Edges Of Life / Samuel Johnson, L. Harold Levinson, J. Allen Smith

Vanderbilt Law Review

Professor Paul Ramsey,' writing as a Christian ethicist, has revised, extended, and updated the Bampton Lectures in America that he delivered in 1975 at Columbia University. The resulting book is Ethics at the Edges of Life: Medical and Legal Intersections. A substantial portion of the book is devoted to critical analysis of a number of landmark court decisions, all of which were rendered after his delivery of the Bampton lectures--Planned Parenthood v. Danforth, on abortion; Commonwealth v. Edelin, on the treatment of a fetus during or immediately after an abortion; In re Quinlan, on the termination of life support; and …

Book Note, Law Review Staff

Vanderbilt Law Review

Mr. Stringfellow strikes hard at the indifference of the legal profession to the plight of the poor before the bar. Usually, they are "simply not represented at all," much less honestly or effectively. He attributes this to three factors: the expense and time usually involved in the legal process, charlatan lawyers who exploit the poor, and the poor man's image of the law derived from police brutality. The police are the poor's most frequent contact with the law, and "the image that they see when they see the law in action is of the law as an enemy." Mr. Stringfellow …

Book Note, Law Review Staff

Vanderbilt Law Review

James Boswell, whose Life of Johnson is generally recognized to be "the most skillfully written biography in the English language, was an eighteenth-century Scottish lawyer, as well as a prominent literary figure. Boswell's private papers, including his now-famous Journal in which he recorded the day-to-day events of his life during most of his adult years, are owned by Yale University; Boswell for the Defense is the seventh volume in the series of Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell and covers a five-year period of his life (from ages 29 to 34), a period of "sustained application to …

Alexander Hamilton And The Historians, Stanley D. Rose

Vanderbilt Law Review

The year of 1957 was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Hamilton--only he was really born in 1755. As befitted such a year,a goodly number of books were put forth by hopeful publishers. What follows will be, at least in part, an evaluation of some of these books and their subject. But first, we ought to ask: Why more of the same? Why more books on a man so well known? We only know the past through the eyes of others. And strangely enough, different eyes see different things when looking at the same subject. In Beveridge's Life …

Charles Evans Hughes: An Appeal To The Bar Of History, Alpheus T. Mason

Vanderbilt Law Review

Preparations for this Pulitzer prize-winning biography began in 1932 when a Princeton University undergraduate, Henry C. Beerits, took Hughes' public career as the topic of his senior thesis. On the suggestion of friends and instructors Beerits sent his sympathetic, uncritical essay to the Chief Justice. Evidently much pleased, Hughes promptly invited the youthful author to Washington, where he spent nearly a year arranging the Justice's public papers. Many sessions were spent together; the Chief Justice reminisced at great length, all this being noted down and turned over to Mr. Pusey. After retirement in 1941 the Chief Justice wrote "several hundred …