Legal Legends

Works in the public domain, often assigned and read as canons of legal history and foundational concepts, but not previously well-reproduced in existing ebooks. Each ebook includes a contemporary Foreword by a legal scholar placing each work in its historic importance and providing interesting biographical summaries and influences. Quid Pro seeks to be the definitive provider of standard legal books published in the U.S. before 1924, with modern context and clarifications.

  • Books,  Featured,  Legal Legends

    Llewellyn’s Classic Guide to Law Study and 1L Advice, The Bramble Bush: features Introduction and notes by Stewart Macaulay

    Written over 80 years ago, but highly relevant still, THE BRAMBLE BUSH is frequently and strongly recommended for students considering law school, just before starting, or early in the first semester. It began as introductory lectures by legal legend Karl Llewellyn to 1Ls at Columbia. It still speaks to law, legal reasoning, class prep, and exam skills--a classic for each new generation. In new paperback, hardcover, Kindle, Apple & Nook. Introduced and annotated.

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    Murphy’s classic Elements of Judicial Strategy is back, adding a new Foreword by Lee Epstein & Jack Knight

    Now in a readily available, modern presentation, and adding a substantive 2016 Foreword by Lee Epstein and Jack Knight, this classic of law and political science is presented to a new generation of thoughtful observers of the U.S. Supreme Court and how its justices create judicial decisions. As Epstein and Knight write, this book is “extraordinary. It’s the rarest of rare: a breakthrough of the path-marking, even paradigm-shifting, variety….” Its publication offered a “huge conceptual breakthrough. Elements was the first to offer a strategic account” of judging, and its “framework forever changed the study of judicial behavior.” It remains influential to current thought, extending even in its “global reach,” and…

  • Books,  Featured,  Legal Legends

    Llewellyn’s classic The Common Law Tradition is Digitally Remastered™ and available in paperback, hardback & ebooks

    Karl Llewellyn, a legal realist whose views on jurisprudence were influential and sometimes controversial, was also one of the leading teachers of fundamental legal thought. He took seriously the functions of courts, the use of precedent, and the power of rules. In this important book, he laid bare these jurisprudential tools, in support of appellate court thinking at all levels in the legal system. Legal analysis is so clearly picked apart that this work has served as a tool-kit for judicial thinking — and persuasive argument to courts — since it was first published in 1960. And his invaluable appendices show in detail how arguments and judicial expressions can be turned around…

  • Books,  Legal Legends,  QP Blog

    The Landis Report to Kennedy on Regulatory Reform Joins Legal Legends Series, in Print and eBooks

    James Landis’ hard-to-find but much-cited Report to Sen. John Kennedy’s committee on administrative regulation and commissions is now readily and affordably available as an ebook or new paperback. Sold out or “unavailable” with major booksellers despite its frequent use in academic literature, the Report finds its new home in the Legal Legends Series. In 1960, James M. Landis drafted the Report on Regulatory Agencies to the President-Elect and submitted it to President-elect (Sen.) John F. Kennedy, reexamining the federal regulatory commissions and administrative agencies’ structures and powers. He recommended such reforms as strengthening the commissions’ chairpersons and streamlining the agencies’ procedures. The Kennedy Administration subsequently adopted many of the recommendations.…

  • Books,  Featured,  Legal Legends,  QP Blog

    Joseph Story’s Constitutional Commentaries Returns (Hardcover, Paperback & eBook); Adds New Intro by Penn’s Kermit Roosevelt

    Justice Joseph Story’s famous and influential review of the origins, influences, and early interpretations of the Constitution is now presented in the author’s own 1833 Abridged Edition—considered the most useful and readable version of this important work, written by the Supreme Court’s youngest member. No other ebook version offers the accessible abridged form, and in proper digital format no less. The new hardcover and paperback use modern, legible font. Plus in print or digital, this edition adds an extensive 2013 introduction by Kermit Roosevelt III. One of the United States’ most influential legal scholars and jurists wrote his landmark treatise before the Civil War, describing federalism, states’ history, freedoms, and…

  • Books,  Featured,  Legal History & Biography,  Legal Legends

    The annotated Common Law: Holmes Gets Decoded for a New Generation, in Hardcover, Paperback & eBook

    The only corrected and annotated version available of this foundational work on law and legal reasoning, read by generations of law students, scholars, and historians -- now in a 2010 edition with an explanatory Foreword, active contents, linked and numbered footnotes, and clarifying annotations throughout. In hardcover, paperback, and eight digital versions.

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    Thomas Reed Powell’s classic Vagaries and Varieties of Constitutional Interpretation is digitally remastered to new eBooks; and in paperback

    The classic study of historical and then-emerging ways in which the U.S. Constitution has been interpreted and applied, especially as regards judicial power to review congressional acts, sharing of power between states and the federal government, Lochnerism, the change in the Supreme Court during the Roosevelt years, taxing power, and interstate commerce. Thomas Reed Powell presented this material first as lectures at Columbia Law School, and their enduring nature and historical insider-ness makes them of current interest to law professors and students, historians, and political scientists who see constitutional structure, and not only rights and liberties, as crucial to understanding U.S. government, the federal-state balance, and the infusion of government…

  • Books,  Legal Legends,  QP Blog

    Roscoe Pound’s The Spirit of the Common Law: Now an ebook, exploring law and sociological jurisprudence

    Pound’s classic 1921 study of what law means—and the concept and history of rules, judicial process, social engineering, and legal reasoning—from the Dean of Harvard Law School and given in lectures at Dartmouth College that year. It is finally available in a high-quality ebook edition. Digital reproductions of such classic texts are typically scanned and forgotten, with no proofreading or usable formatting. But the Legal Legends Edition from Quid Pro features quality formatting and careful reproduction of the original book into a proper, modern ebook. Includes active TOC, fully linked Index (keyed to original page numbers), and 2012 Notes of the Series Editor by Steven Alan Childress, law professor at…

  • Books,  Featured,  Legal Legends

    The Nature and the Sources of the Law: John Chipman Gray’s Anatomy of Jurisprudence, Comparative Law, and the Concept of Rights

    The Nature and Sources of the Law (Second Edition, 1921) is Gray’s legal and jurisprudential classic, finally available in a high-quality eBook edition and new paperback. It is the 11th contribution in the Legal Legends Series and, unlike most such classics typically reproduced by crude scanning, offers full assurances of careful proofreading, proper formatting, and modern presentation. The eBooks also offer active Contents and linked footnotes. John Chipman Gray (1839-1915) was a noted lawyer and legal scholar of the progressive era and a founder of the Boston law firm Ropes & Gray. His important book analyzed the uses of precedent and custom, the meaning of law and legal rights, the…