This book describes law in its essentials. Law is riddled with quibbles and caveats, but in the interests of clarity, I have forgone the customary qualifiers of “generally,” “for the most part,” “subject to,” “absent other factors,” etc., save where it was important to emphasize exceptions/generality or when a concept was introduced for the first time. I have also focused on federal law, which applies nationwide.
This book presents law as it stood in 2018, though law’s tremendous inertia should keep matters current for some time. The most likely and consequential shifts over the next few years will involve federal agencies and executive power (Chapters 5 and 13, especially).
The standard inflation-adjustment is CPI-U (Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers). Anachronistic spellings and capitalizations have been updated where sensible.
Britain plays an outsize role in American law. Because English practices dominated British and early American legal thinking, I have conflated Britain and England where doing so is reasonable.
I have omitted the last three days of a Congressional term in references to years (e.g., the 115th Congress ran from January 3, 2017 to January 3, 2019, but for simplicity, its work is denoted as for 2017 to 2018). Citations within citations are also omitted without comment by default, and I have not conformed the endnotes to the nitpicker’s bible/legal citation manual, The Bluebook. There should only be four basic rules for citation: (1) accuracy; (2) reasonable consistency; (3) sufficient detail to give readers an impression of a source’s credibility and aptness; (4) enough information that one cut, one paste, and two clicks can retrieve the source.