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Through thoughtful organization, careful material selection, and hundreds of practice questions, Administrative Law: A Lifecycle Approach, by Dean Jamelle C. Sharpe, trains students to thoroughly understand the law and theory underpinning the modern administrative state.
At its core, administrative law is a process-driven course. Nevertheless, traditional casebooks are organized around legal concepts and doctrines rather than the basic stages of administrative decision-making. This casebook improves on the traditional model by following the major steps in the administrative process, thereby providing students with ample grounding in the law and practice governing it. In addition to featuring seminal administrative law decisions, Administrative Law: A Lifecycle Approach incorporates a variety of agency-oriented materials—government reports, charts, diagrams, orders—that give students a fuller sense of how the administrative state’s organization and operations. These carefully edited materials model how skilled jurists and administrative lawyers go about their work, how legal problems with that work arise, and how administrative, judicial, and political processes have developed to address them. Critically, this casebook also provides numerous opportunities for guided review, synthesis, analysis, and application of salient legal concepts to facilitate student learning. Dozens of questions, as many or more than any other casebook on the market, place students in the position of lawyers tasked with navigating the administrative landscape.
New to the Second Edition:
- Updated cases.
- Updated developments in regulatory policy and practices.
Professors and students will benefit from:
- In comparison with casebooks that focus almost exclusively on appellate decisions from Article III courts, this book emphasizes the lifecycle of the administrative decision-making process to place the legal doctrines typically covered by the administrative law course in a clearer practical context. Examples of agency work product and descriptions of agency organization and operations are strategically placed throughout the book. The book also provides explanatory introductions to most topics and describes basic and recurring fact patterns that lawyers encounter when dealing with the issues of administrative law and policy.
- Most administrative law casebooks are comprised almost entirely of the most unusual or factually complex cases. While there is certainly value in asking students to wrestle with such cases, Administrative Law: A Lifecycle Approach substitutes them for more readily accessible materials of equal or greater instructional value. Where the inclusion of complex cases is unavoidable—as is the case with several seminal decisions— this casebook provides introductory explanations to give students much needed guidance on their meaning and key concepts. Additionally, Administrative Law: A Lifecycle Approach includes other agency-oriented materials—reports, charts, diagrams, opinions—to give students a fuller, unmediated sense of administrative work product.
- Administrative Law: A Lifecycle Approach also takes a different approach to questions. The questions in traditional casebooks typically focus on issues that are tangential to the materials they follow, or pinpoint conceptual knots that academics spend their careers attempting to unravel. Inspired by Bloom’s Taxonomy, the questions in Administrative Law: A Lifecycle Approach focus instead on testing, reinforcing, and extending students’ understanding of the administrative law and concepts featured throughout the book. It accordingly provides numerous problems that prompt students to apply what they have learned and to produce the types of analysis expected of skilled administrative lawyers.
