Legislation and Regulation: Cases and Materials

by John F. Manning, Matthew C. Stephenson

This casebook is specifically designed for a first-year class on Legislation & Regulation, and provides a proven, ready-to-use set of materials for schools or instructors interested in introducing such a class to their 1L curriculum. This book is based on the materials used in Harvard Law School's 1L Legislation and Regulation course, which has rapidly become one of the most popular and effective courses in Harvard's 1L curriculum, and one of the most successful experiments in introducing statutory and regulatory law and principles into the first year. The book integrates material on statutory interpretation and regulatory law in a single text, and presents this material in a way that is accessible to 1Ls and easy to teach. In addition, this book's integration of statutory interpretation and regulatory law would make it an attractive alternative text for upper-level Administrative Law courses at schools that do not offer a 1L Legislation & Regulation class, and the material on statutory interpretation would be suitable for a Legislation course focused principally on statutory interpretation. The book focuses on the tools and methods of interpreting legal texts, using Supreme Court and other appellate decisions as the primary texts, yet the note material gently introduces students to applicable insights from political science, history, economics, and philosophy. The pedagogical objectives of this book are to familiarize students with the tools and techniques that lawyers and judges use when crafting legal arguments in statutory or regulatory contexts, and to give students a sense of the larger questions of institutional design that are implicated by these interpretive questions.

Genres: Law

996 pages, Hardcover

First published June 9, 2010

Reviews

[Youlia]

This book is 1115 pages of substantive material + the appendix, which we literally read cover to cover in my LegReg class so I am GETTING MY GOODREADS CREDIT FOR THIS. take that law school!!!

(yes i am giving this 5 stars, it is the best organized textbook i have had all year, ty @ john f manning, u a real one, bless)

[Danny Sitko]

This book essentially read like Harry Potter where the first half you are learning these goofy ass spells with Latin names, and then the second half you read about all the ways dudes in black robes are using them to make your life miserable.

[Lila Zarrella]

APA… more like APslay

[Ian]

Waffled between two or three stars on this one. I figure that because LegReg is a relatively squishy subject and my own bad habits contributed to not enjoying the book, I'll give it the benefit of the doubt.

The authors chose the right cases, provided meaningful context most of the time, and wrote relatively clearly.

My major demerits can be summed up as "why am I reading this instead of something else?"

First, the authors spend too much time explaining legal academic battles. I got the sense that Admin Law is the "prestige" academic legal topic. A flood of academic writing dissects and re-dissects Supreme Court decisions in this area. The authors devote substantial space in the after-case notes to explain how academics have been fighting over the case since. Entire paragraphs are just string citations to legal academic articles. There's no right answer to the questions they fight over, so I think it ends up being fuss without a point. (I'll grudgingly accept that I found the fights interesting some times).

Second, the books does the same "paragraph of questions" technique that I find so irritating in other textbooks. These paragraphs waste the student's time. If the authors want me to think through an issue, or apply the ruling to a new situation, then format it that way.

By the end of the class, I found myself surprised how much of doing "well" in LegReg involves exercising good judgment. Good judgment, in the absence of mechanical rules, tends to involve experience in making those judgments. LegReg, in my ideal world, would be an experiential class that involved making statutory interpretation decisions or reviewing an agency's actions. Realizing that's probably impractical (we had 110 students in the lecture class), I would hope for a textbook that affords some opportunity to do that. Because it doesn't, I found the demerits above more serious.

[Anna Moiseieva]

are tomatoes fruits or vegetables? what does it mean to "use" a gun during a drug deal? do you include the weight of the carrier medium for LSD when determining prison sentences? can one kill their grandfather and still get the inheritance? answers to these questions and more found inside. Statutory interpretation is super interesting so enjoyed learning about all the "tools" judges can use (bout to start using ejusdem generis and noscitur a sociis at work 🙂‍↕️) Admin law is also pretty cool and the notes explaining it give a good overview of the APA and important developments (rip Chevron deference, Humphrey's Executor soon to go) in the space.

[Michael I]

About 800 pages too long. It helps no one to batch-list 10 law review articles after one sentence with no parentheticals to explain what the article is cited for.

Also, missing like 5 really important cases on agency structure.

[Jon]

Excellent, canonical, inclined toward scholarship but keeps its feet on the ground. Could use more content on pragmatic and normativist schools of thought (e.g. critical theories).

[Monroe]

My favorite law school textbook :)

[Grace]

the citations got a little annoying but great content! girl’s gotta meet her reading goals somehow

[Molly]

this was fine but the panic about separation of powers every chapter got kind of old

[Ruby Jarvis]

PAIN

[Ryan Merchant]

Legislative history = bad

[Lucy]

read this in a book club with my 82 closest friends (law school section)

[Weixiao Ashley]

Authoritative author in the field. But beware of Manning's conservative agenda.