American Law in a Global Context: The Basics, now in a thoroughly revised edition, is an elegant and erudite introduction to the American legal system from a global perspective. Drawing on some comparative examples with a focus on American law, George P. Fletcher, Hoi L. Kong, and Steve Sheppard introduce underlying principles of common and civil law, constitutional, criminal, and public law, and property and procedure. The appendices include an introduction to the common law method, instruction on how to read a case, the interpretation of statutes, and an introduction to the Federal system and US courts systems. This revised edition offers a greater focus on American law itself and includes the addition of an easy-to-use Bibliography as well as a new Civil Procedure Appendix.
Fletcher, Kong, and Sheppard provide a clear roadmap through essential areas of US law with in-depth analyses of well-known cases. These cases allow readers the opportunity to examine not only law as theory but as practice, while guiding them to further exploration through suggested readings.
A must-own reference source for LLM students, undergraduates, and students of US law in other countries.

George P. Fletcher, Cardozo Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia Law School, is one of the world's best known scholars of international and comparative criminal law. Fletcher's 20 books, over 150 scholarly articles, and dozens of lectures around the globe have created and redefined many concepts in criminal law and international law. As a lawyer, his US Supreme Court brief in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld convinced the majority that the case should be in Guantanamo but in civilian federal court, and as a young professor , his research and analysis, in a team led by Nuremburg prosecutor Telford Taylor, assisted Jewish emigres escaping the Soviet Union.


Hoi L. Kong is the The Rt. Hon. Beverley McLachlin, P.C., UBC Professor in Constitutional Law at the University of British Columbia's Peter A. Allard School of Law. He is also a Fellow of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation and Senior Research Fellow at University of Texas at Austin's Program on Constitutional Studies. Before joining the University of British Columbia, he was an Associate Professor at McGill University's Faculty of Law, where he served a term as Associate Dean (Academic). At the outset of his legal career, he was a law clerk to Justice L'Heureux-Dubé and Justice Deschamps at the Supreme Court of Canada.


Steve Sheppard, Dean Emeritus of St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio, is a practitioner-scholar whose research at the intersection of legal history and legal philosophy has long informed his integration of fundamental ideas into understandable and useful tools for students and lawyers. Editor of essential books of the common law by Coke, Selden, Blackstone, Jones, Lieber, Llewellyn, and Farnsworth, and author of the new edition of Bouvier's Law Dictionary, in 2016, Sheppard's scholarship on legal education and the legal profession led him to chair the Texas Supreme Court's review of the Texas Bar Exam.