I Do Solemnly Swear: The Moral Obligations of Legal Officials |  | Author: Steve Sheppard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $29.99
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Seller: spectrumbooks
Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 584609
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 0521735084
Dewey Decimal Number: 174.30973
EAN: 9780521735087
ASIN: 0521735084
Publication Date: April 27, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
What should the people expect from their legal officials? This book asks whether officials can be moral and still follow the law, answering that the law requires them to do so. It revives the idea of the good official - the good lawyer, the good judge, the good president, the good legislator - that guided Cicero and Washington and that we seem to have forgotten. Based on stories and law cases from America's founding to the present, this book examines what is good and right in law and why officials must care. This overview of official duties, from oaths to the law itself, explains how morals and law work together to create freedom and justice, and it provides useful maxims to argue for the right answer in hard cases. Important for scholars but useful for lawyers and readable by anybody, this book explains how American law ought to work.
Book Description
How should morals change what officials do? The arguments of scholars have been controversial and hard to understand. This book bridges the gap and describes law and morals as working together in a way that isn't really controversial, just hard. It requires officials to work for the common good and in good faith, and to put the people over party, money, and negligence. Real laws require good morals, and this book uses cases from Pontius Pilate to Eliot Sptizer to teach how officials can do it right.
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| Customer Reviews:
Why I wrote this book May 31, 2009
Steve Sheppard (Fayetteville, AR USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Hi, I'm Steve, the author of this book. I wrote it because America used to be good at talking about right and about wrong when done by our leaders. We didn't depend on which party the leader came from to decide. We didn't use cheap labels like judicial activist or mainstream. We asked whether a judge listened to the evidence, whether a legislator listened to the people, whether a governor or president solved problems.
This book looks back at the old argument and retells them for today: this is how we can disagree about policy but agree on good officials. I use stories from the colonies, from recent scandals, from books and movies, and from great writers about the law to develop these ideas. This is how we can disagree on law or policy but still judge someone who works hard to do the right thing or who does the wrong thing completely.
It ends with a list of easily used rules that you can use yourself.
Hope you like it.
Steve Sheppard
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