The Oxford Guide to United States Supreme Court Decisions Edited
by Kermit L. Hall and James W. Ely Jr. Oxford, 528 pp., $35

In 1992 Oxford University Press brought out The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States. Organized alphabetically, the more than thousand-page book had entries on the Court's history and current operation, the justices themselves, legal doctrines and vocabulary, and the Court's leading decisions, such as Marbury v. Madison--which confirmed the power of constitutional review, and without which the book would have been much smaller, if indeed a book at all--and, more recognizably, Brown v. Board of Education, which declared unconstitutional segregated public schools.

Seven years later the editor of the Companion, Kermit Hall, put together another alphabetically structured but much shorter Oxford book: The Oxford Guide to United States Supreme Court Decisions. The Guide treated the most important decisions, like Marbury and Brown--some 440 in all. Not surprisingly, since Hall edited both books, many of the case entries he used for the Guide were originally composed for the Companion. He edited some of those entries while also adding new ones on big decisions handed down after the Companion was published.

In 2005, Hall updated the Companion in a second edition. And now, the Guide has been published in a second edition. It includes case entries first composed for the 2005 Companion as well as entries on decisions rendered since 2005. Among the cases treated here that are not in the first edition are Bush v. Gore (2000), the Michigan

Oxford identifies Hall, who died in 2006, and the legal historian James W. Ely, as coeditors. It's a fitting designation for Hall, since the Companion and the Guide were his books to begin with. Moreover, Hall himself contributed more entries to the Guide than anyone else, with 49 in the second edition. The cases Hall wrote on range in subject matter from voting rights to racial set-asides to federalism to free speech to public school prayer to abortion.

Each entry begins with the name of the case, its official citation in the United States Reports, and other basic information. The decision is described and analyzed, and notable concurrences or dissents noted. So are subsequent responses to rulings in later cases or in legislation passed by Congress.

While there are more liberal scholars than not among the more than 100 contributors--drawn as most are from legal and political science faculties, hardly Republican redoubts--conservative scholars are not absent. They include Nelson Lund, who contributed the entry on District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 case in which the Court adopted the individual-rights interpretation of the Second Amendment; and Gail Heriot, who composed the entry on Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (and a companion case from Louisville), the 2007 cases in which the Court struck down race-based policies designed to achieve racial balance in public schools.