The next edition of Ames, Chafee, and Re on Remedies is off to the publisher (Foundation) for next fall, and I'm going to write a series of posts about the revision. Who is the audience for these posts? Well, I expect law students will be very interested in what goes into a casebook revision, especially given the cost of casebooks. Law professors who teach Remedies will be interested, as well as those who might teach Remedies soon. If you're a practicing lawyer and want to know what is on the cutting edge of remedies thinking, this will be of interest for you. (Think of it as CLE that's to the point but, alas, without credit.) If you're just interested in some of the philosophical choices behind casebooks–the tradeoffs between different models–then this may interest you as well. And if you wish you'd taken Remedies in law school, this is a plate of hors d'oeuvres that might whet your appetite to study it for yourself.
Let me start with a word or two about this casebook. It started in 1902 as Cases on Equity Jurisdiction by James Barr Ames, dean of Harvard Law School. It's had some illustrious authors, including Zechariah Chafee, Sidney Post Simpson, Edward Re, Ted Eisenberg, and Emily Sherwin. It was an equity book until 1982, when damages and restitution materials were added by Judge Re. Its current title–Ames, Chafee, and Re on Remedies–dates to 2012, when Professors Eisenberg and Sherwin became the editors. The upcoming edition will be the fourth edition under this name. And it's the third edition that I've been on.
There are lots of good remedies casebooks, with a number of different approaches. Instead of doing head-to-head comparisons, I'll highlight three things that distinguish this book. This will set the stage for the discussion of the revisions in the next post.
