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Lexis-Nexis Digital Library

All Lexis print titles held by the Library are available in electronic format to FAMU College of Law community members. This includes major subject treatises, such as Corbin on Contracts and Nimmer on Copyright, practice treatises, such as Moore’s Federal Practice, and Florida-specific subject and practice treatises.

The Digital Library also has a collection of study aid materials, including the Understanding series. For a full list of study aid and supplement titles, please use the link at the end of this list of databases. The links in the document will take you directly to the title you are interested in.

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Law School Hints and News

To Succeed in Law School Consider Taking Breaks Outside

Law school is a stressful, trying process. It requires you to spend hours attending classes, planning, writing, and scheduling numerous pulls on your time. The constant tension of law school can take its toll on even the most dedicated of students and can lead to anxiety, sleepless nights, and layers of personal and professional stress.

Sometimes, taking a step away from things, in both a literal and figurative sense, is the best thing to do. Health professionals recommend that people take occasional breaks from their daily routines and visit nature in one form or another. Just taking a walk outside and getting sunlight has been shown to improve the health and mood of individuals. With all the great beaches and nature parks in Florida, you should take a little time away from the demands of law school and enjoy some time outdoors. Please do not forget your sunglasses, sunscreen, and water when you go!

Monthly Showcase

The monthly display for July provides resources discussing the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

For Ourselves and Our Posterity by Peter Charles Hoffer
ISBN: 9780199899531
Publication Date: 2012-08-22
In For Ourselves and Our Posterity: The Preamble to the Federal Constitution in American History, author Peter Charles Hoffer offers a sweeping, dramatic narration of a crucial moment in Early American history. Over the course of five days in September 1787, five men serving on an ad hoc "Committee of Style and Arrangement" edited the draft of the federal Constitution at the Constitutional Convention, profoundly recasting the wording of the Preamble. In so doing, the committee changed a federation into a Union and laid out an ambitious program for national governance many years ahead of its time. The Preamble and all that it came to represent was the unique achievement of a remarkable group of men at a momentous turning point in American history. Providing a clear exposition of constitutional issues, For Ourselves and Our Posterity features individual portraits of the leading framers at the heart of this dramatic event.
The Creation of the U. S. Constitution by Loreta M. Medina
ISBN: 0737712627
Publication Date: 2003-04-22
The U.S. Constitution--with its message of liberty, the primacy of the will of the people, government accountability, separation of powers, and other democratic principles--continues today to be the model for other nations. This anthology traces the history of the framing of the Constitution in 1787 and discusses the document's important provisions, its amendments, and its legacy for subsequent generations of Americans.
Presidential Power in an Age of Terrorism by Christopher Pyle; Richard Pious
ISBN: 9781594608773
Publication Date: 2010-10-01
The Constitution Under Siege is a provocative teaching instrument that uses law, history, and politics to test what the law arguably "is" against assertions of what it "ought" to be. It examines the questionable impulses of presidents, members of Congress, the military, and intelligence agencies to bend or break the Constitution and the laws. In questioning the legitimacy of raw assertions of unaccountable power, the editors reject both the illustrative case approach of political scientists and precedent-driven approach of lawyers, supplementing key court cases with historically-rich essays, notes, and questions. These essays explain where our nation's "first principles" came from, and why they became imbedded, at least until recently, in our laws and institutions. Above all, these materials will prompt the reader to ask how, and by what authority, presidents, Congress, and even courts have come to allow the military and secret agencies to kidnap, torture, assassinate, or secretly detain citizens or aliens, and to use military and para-military force without running afoul of the Constitution and its Bill of Rights. "This superb book, written by two of the nation's most acute analysts of law and politics, provides readers with materials indispensable to an understanding of the many dubious assertions of governmental power, by both presidents and Congress, that have rocked the foundations of our republic. ... It is must reading for all those concerned about the future of constitutional government." -- David Gray Adler, James McClure Professor of Public Policy at the University of Idaho "The Constitution Under Siege offers unparalleled insights arising from the authors' singular mastery of documents, events, and law. From the Barbary pirates to Islamic terrorism, no single source more definitively instructs the reader as it interweaves American law and policy abroad. This is an indispensable book." -- Robert J. Spitzer, Distinguished Service Professor, SUNY, Cortland
Understanding the Constitution by Jack W. Peltason
ISBN: 0030711762
Publication Date: 1985-01-01
Southern slaveholders proudly pronounced themselves orthodox Christians, who accepted responsibility for the welfare of the people who worked for them. They proclaimed that their slaves enjoyed a better and more secure life than any laboring class in the world. Now, did it not follow that the lives of laborers of all races across the world would be immeasurably improved by their enslavement? In the Old South but in no other slave society a doctrine emerged among leading clergymen, politicians, and intellectuals - 'Slavery in the Abstract', which declared enslavement the best possible condition for all labor regardless of race. They joined the Socialists, whom they studied, in believing that the free-labor system, wracked by worsening class warfare, was collapsing. A vital question: to what extent did the people of the several social classes of the South accept so extreme a doctrine? That question lies at the heart of this book.
Declaring Independence by David McCullough; University of Virginia, Library Staff (Contribution by); Pauline Maier; Robert G. Parkinson; Robert M. S. McDonald; David Armitage; Sandra Day O'Connor; Christian Yves Dupont (Editor); Peter S. Onuf (Editor)
ISBN: 9780979999703
Publication Date: 2008-05-07
"This volume asks us to reread and rethink our founding document. The Declaration of Independence as we now understand it - the stirring passages that define our democratic creed - is not the Declaration that Thomas Jefferson and his congressional colleagues drafted, nor the document that inspired or provoked contemporaneous readers and listeners at home and abroad." "Essays by four of the Declaration's leading students make the historic text come alive, enabling us to hear what it had to say in its own time and what it might have to say to us today. Copiously illustrated with selections from the Albert H. Small Declaration of Independence Collection at the University of Virginia and complemented by biographical sketches of the Declaration signers, this volume offers a rich resource for discovering the origin and influence of America's founding document."--BOOK JACKET.
State Constitutions of the United States by Robert L. Maddex
ISBN: 1568023731
Publication Date: 1998-10-01
A survey of the constitutions of all 50 US states, as well as the US territories, American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico. Arranged alphabetically by state, each profile includes the constitution's history and influences, and its division of powers.
March of Liberty by Melvin I. Urofsky; Paul Finkelman
ISBN: 0195126343
Publication Date: 2001-08-16
A March of Liberty is a clearly written, comprehensive overview of American constitutional development from the founding of the English colonies down through the decisions of the latest term of the Supreme Court. It presents the most comprehensive overview of American constitutional development now available, reflecting the latest in contemporary scholarship. The authors examine in detail the great cases handed down by the Supreme Court, showing how these cases played outin the society at large and how constitutional growth parallels change in American culture. The authors also look at lesser known decisions that played important roles in effecting change, and at the justices who made these decisions. The book offers students of American constitutional history a completereference work which is intelligible to the layperson as well as to the specialist.
Preserving the Constitution by Michael Les Benedict
ISBN: 9780823225545
Publication Date: 2006-05-15
"Americans' ideas about constitutional liberty played a crucial role in the history of Reconstruction. They provided the basis for the Republican program of equal rights; ironically, they also set the limits to that program and reduced the prospects for its success. Americans were as concerned with preserving the Constitution as they were with changing it to protect liberty and equal rights. These two commitments were in profound tension. The question was how one could change the constitutional system to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence--to entrench a republic dedicated to liberty instead of slavery--and yet preserve the essentials of federalism and local democracy. Almost 150 years later we still struggle with these problems." --Michael Les Benedict, from the Introduction Historians and legal scholars continue to confront the failure of Reconstruction, exploring the interaction of pervasive racism with widespread commitments to freedom and equality. In this important book, one of America's leading historians confronts the constitutional politics of the period from the end of the Civil War until 1877. Benedict updates ten of his classic essays that explore the way Republicans tried to replace the slaveholding republic with a nation dedicated to freedom and equality of basic legal and political rights--and how Americans' constitutional commitments, and those of Republicans themselves, limited reform. Expertly bridging legal, political, party history, the essays explore the fate of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, as well as the struggle between President and Congress over the course of Reconstruction. Brought together for the first time with a new introduction, and revised to reflect emerging scholarship, the essays are essential points of departure for students and scholars in history, law, and political science.
Hybrid Constitutions by Vicki Hsueh
ISBN: 9780822346180
Publication Date: 2010-01-27
In Hybrid Constitutions, Vicki Hsueh contests the idea that early-modern colonial constitutions were part of a uniform process of modernization, conquest, and assimilation. Through detailed analyses of the founding of several seventeenth-century English proprietary colonies in North America, she reveals how diverse constitutional thought and practice were at the time, and how colonial ambitions were advanced through cruelty toward indigenous peoples as well as accommodation of them. Proprietary colonies were governed by individuals (or small groups of individuals) granted colonial charters by the Crown. These proprietors had quasi-sovereign status over their colonies; they were able to draw on and transform English legal and political instruments as they developed constitutions. Hsueh demonstrates that the proprietors cobbled together constitutions based on the terms of their charters and the needs of their settlements. The "hybrid constitutions" they created were often altered based on interactions among the English settlers, other European settlers, and indigenous peoples. Hsueh traces the historical development and theoretical implications of proprietary constitutionalism by examining the founding of the colonies of Maryland, Carolina, and Pennsylvania. She provides close readings of colonial proclamations, executive orders, and assembly statutes, as well as the charter granting Cecilius Calvert the colony of Maryland in 1632; the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, adopted in 1669; and the treaties brokered by William Penn and various Lenni Lenape and Susquehannock tribes during the 1680s and 1690s. These founding documents were shaped by ambition, contingency, and limited resources; they reflected an ambiguous and unwieldy colonialism rather than a purposeful, uniform march to modernity. Hsueh concludes by reflecting on hybridity as a rubric for analyzing the historical origins of colonialism and reconsidering contemporary indigenous claims in former settler colonies such as Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.
The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution by Jack P. Greene
ISBN: 9780521760935
Publication Date: 2010-10-25
Using the British Empire as a case study, this succinct study argues that the establishment of overseas settlements in America created a problem of constitutional organization. The failure to resolve the resulting tensions led to the thirteen continental colonies seceding from the empire in 1776. Challenging those historians who have assumed that the British had the law on their side during the debates that led to the American Revolution, this volume argues that the empire had long exhibited a high degree of constitutional multiplicity, with each colony having its own discrete constitution. Contending that these constitutions cannot be conflated with the metropolitan British constitution, it argues that British refusal to accept the legitimacy of colonial understandings of the sanctity of the many colonial constitutions and the imperial constitution was the critical element leading to the American Revolution.

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FAMU Law Library Online Repository

Be sure to visit the Library’s Online Repository at http://commons.law.famu.edu/.

The Repository holds a variety of publications and documents that could be useful for projects and research. Alumni, faculty, and student academic publications are available free to access to anyone on the web and cover a wide variety of topics. Through the online repository platform, FAMU College of Law’s Scholarly Commons scholarship has reached thousands of researchers around the world. To see the readership that the College's scholarship has, you can view the daily downloads of the Repository’s holdings through a map located at the bottom of the main page.

The Repository also hosts materials on FAMU College of Law’s founding, including information on the efforts of Virgil Hawkins to enter into the profession of law.

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