David Kennedy (1) (1957–)

When it comes to my law school textbooks, this one is extremely readable. In terms of density and clarity of ideas some primary texts are tougher to plow through than others but I really enjoyed the biographical works the authors added before each article. Aspects I appreciated in those biographical sections include the history of the scholar's life, a rundown of their cronies and their main influences, and a discussion of what trends in legal thought or in American society may have influenced their writing.

I used this text in an American Legal Thought class and we used it as our primary textbook and supplemented it with major cases and outside articles that dealt with the topic of the week.

I might be totally out of touch with the realities of understanding legal texts as a non-lawyer at this point(last semester of law school) but I would say this is a great reader for nearly anyone with a basic understanding of our legal, political, and economic systems.… (meer)