Preface

this book is a general introduction to the law and the legal system of the United States. In a way, writing another book about American law would seem to be like bringing another coal to Newcastle. There is certainly no shortage of books about our legal system. The Harvard Law School library, which is just about the biggest in the country except for the Library of Congress, has more than two million volumes. Hundreds of thousands of these are books about American law. Every year, Harvard adds thousands more to its collection. Of the making of law books, there seems to be no end. Do we really need more? Perhaps we do. Almost all of those thousands and thousands of books are meant for the specialized eyes of the lawyers. Very few are written for the layman. True, in recent years, scores of “how to” books have appeared: how to get your own divorce, how to avoid probate, how to deal with your landlord, how to resolve the legal problems of cohabiters, and the like. There are also some popular handbooks about people’s rights, how to “win big” in small claims courts, and so on. Books of this kind are no novelty. In the nineteenth century, too, there were “how to” books, with names like Every Man His Own Lawyer. Some were extremely popular. One such book, published in 1867, claimed it would be valuable for just about everybody: the “city wholesale merchant,” the retailer, the country merchant, attorneys, justices of the peace, farmers, mechanics, even the “discharged soldier or sailor” of the Civil War, who would find “all the instructions and forms necessary” to get back pay or a pension, in language “so plain as to make the whole matter perfectly clear and simple.”