This book is a remarkably good idea. It consists of edited versions of 10 Supreme Court decisions--along with the occasional famous dissent--that have passed into our everyday parlance, sometimes under their abbreviated case names, such as Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade, but more often under popular rubrics, such as in those two cases, the school desegregation decision and the abortion decision. The editors' objective has been to make the actual words of these momentous and controversial judicial documents accessible to laypersons by excising "long legal citations, micro print footnotes, and wordy wrangles over points of procedure" and providing definitions, translations, identifications, and explanations as needed. In this modest paperback, they've done the job well and utterly sans frills. The other eight decisions included concern obscenity, school prayer, fair trials (Gideon v. Wain~wright), sexual privacy, censorship (the Pentagon Papers case), affirmative action, book banning, and flag burning. The text of the Constitution makes up an eleventh chapter. ~--Ray Olson