Admiralty and Maritime Law in the United States

Book excerpt: The maritime law of the United States is harmonious in broad outline with the laws of other maritime nations, but it has a unique structure--tied to the U.S. Constitution and the Judiciary Act of 1789--entailing a special set of intellectual challenges. Admiralty and Maritime Law in the United States is a leading casebook that reveals the areas of international harmony and explores U.S. law's special features. Each of the authors is an admiralty expert, but the book strives for a generalist's perspective. It aims to tie the admiralty field into the students' other studies while providing the fundamental professional tools necessary to the advanced study or practice of U.S. maritime law. Instructors new to admiralty found the first edition of Admiralty and Maritime Law to be an orderly and user-friendly introduction to the field. Experienced admiralty professors found the book to be well organized and thorough. In the second edition, the authors have drawn on these reports and their own teaching experiences. The book's basic organization and approach have been retained, but much of the second edition is brand-new. Older cases have yielded to leading new ones, new textual material has been added, and older textual material has been deleted or streamlined. Many of the cases that carried over from the first edition have been edited into shorter versions. The second edition incorporates the body of admiralty statutes that came into effect in October 2006 and the reformulated ("plain English") Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that took effect in December 2007. It includes the Supreme Court's dramatic new decisions in Stewart v. Dutra Construction Co., Norfolk Southern Railway v. Kirby, Norfolk Southern Railway v. Sorrell, and even--in a stop-the-press one-page summary--the June 2008 Exxon Valdez punitive damages case. When asked to identify the best new feature of the second edition, the authors respond: "There are 70 fewer pages of text." In three semester hours, one can teach all of it. For shorter or more ruminatively paced courses, the Teacher's Manual provides suggestions on what to omit. A 2012 Teacher's Manual is available as of July 2012; there is also a 2013-14 Supplement.