Desert-Island Book

 Posted on May 18, 2010 in Uncategorized

Old-time West Texas judges used to travel the circuit with a single law book (and they were still better-read than most modern Texas judges...).

If you had to preserve a single criminal-law volume so that the American criminal justice system would survive, what would you choose?

If civilization were crumbling around our ears (if? who am I kidding?), I had to bug out to terra incognita, and I could take only one book to help ensure the survival of the rule of law, my desert-island pick would be the Georgetown Review of Criminal Procedure. I always have a copy on my bookshelf, and it's the first place I look when I face an unfamiliar question of criminal procedure. Its analysis is not deep, but it is broad, fitting a huge amount of criminal-law knowledge into a small space.

Substance is nothing, procedure is everything. If all legal knowledge went up in flames, humanity would come up with a new penal code in a trice, but without a tome like the Georgetown Review, the principles and rules of criminal procedure would take centuries to reconstruct.

What's your pick?